Many government orgs have spent the last decade and a half slowly transitioning old legacy applications and platforms to browser-based alternatives. That old ERP software that used to require a thick client? Now it runs in Chrome. Microsoft recognized this and smartly moved to keep these customers locked in via an ever growing Microsoft Office bundle - subscription based, with Teams for their chat and then building up additional capabilities to extend the dependency, like InTune.
Where we are at now is that the pain of moving away from Windows is acceptable for many larger organizations and governments, especially those with flat or decreasing budgets. You can just swap out the OS layer and keep other processes the same - keep using Office with just the browser versions if you want, or move to an alternative (like EU-based). Teams works on Linux. There is no moat on Windows anymore
And many of those tool providers could see for 10-20 years now that if they didn't provide a web based version sometime soon, they would go out of business sooner or later.
There are almost no applications that a government employee should be running natively on their machine anyway.
A bigger blocker I see in Belgium is all the corporate and government software written in Java or .NET-with-Angular and that has to be deployed via Azure because… compliance.
Yes, slower start, more memory/cpu use, likely worse UI as the transition broke desktop conventions and/or just lost some power features in the process
Eh. I suppose to each their own, but my experience as a user and developer is… that it depends on a lot of factors.
Many web apps open faster than many apps I have installed. Some of these apps have a faster mobile web app version.
And then, of course, there’s Apple’s increasingly bad choices in interaction and interface design. Some web apps are superior because they stick to simpler or more appealing design.
Linear comes to mind, their iOS app post-Liquid Glass is unappealing. Their macOS version is effectively a web app, and a very good one at that. Things is native and wonderful. Apple’s own apps can be both slow and ugly (hi App Store!).
Where we are at now is that the pain of moving away from Windows is acceptable for many larger organizations and governments, especially those with flat or decreasing budgets. You can just swap out the OS layer and keep other processes the same - keep using Office with just the browser versions if you want, or move to an alternative (like EU-based). Teams works on Linux. There is no moat on Windows anymore