Wired magazine, issue 15.04, had an article titled "Desktop, R.I.P." which included this quote:

Apps once came in shrink-wrapped boxes and ran on a local operating system; today they live increasingly on the Internet, where they run in a Web browser for a monthly fee — or for no charge at all.

Now, even accounting for hype that accompanies Wired articles, its clear that the river of applications is flowing fast downstream from the desktop to the browser. Is Apollo a salmon going upstream?

I do not expect Apollo to replace web applications, the advantages of the later are just too huge for that to happen, but at work we have been discussing how we will look to use Apollo to compliment our existing web applications.  Why might we use Apollo?

• Some of our users spend hours working with our web application.  Spending that long working in a browser is not always fun, I used to run both Yahoo Mail Beta and GMail all day long in a browser but eventually it would crash normally because the browser was running near capacity and I went to some other site that had an error.  
• Closer interaction with a users file system.  This could be a big plus for us when syncing files.
• Cross platform compatibility.  Without this I don't think we would even consider Apollo.  A couple years ago Southwest introduced Ding which is a piece of software that you download and it then notifies you, by dinging!, of special fares.  As is often the case the Windows version was first and then a considerable time later the Mac version came out.  With Apollo both versions would come out at the same time.