Looking at products like Dropbox and Evernote, not to mention everything going on with iPhone/Android apps, I can't help but thing that they provide a bit of a counter to the conventional wisdom that native "fat clients" are dead. The people I know who use Dropbox basically never use the Dropbox website except to sign up and to download the client. The client is the magic, not the website.
It makes me wonder what other services might benefit from native clients....
Without the website though to compliment it dropbox would have been less valuable to me, although still the best syncing solution. There have been many times at uni or at someones house where the website interface has come in very handy.
I'm certainly not doubting that not having a website at all would be a loss. It just fascinates me how much of a gain it is for some services to have a great local client.
We've used a native client for many years and it served us well, only when we were able to give the users a comparable experience with just the browser did we make the switch. Even today there are still plenty of people that use the installed software, we've done what we could to make it backwards compatible.
It makes me wonder what other services might benefit from native clients....