More and more applications are moving to run on the web. With online office suites like Zoho and Google Docs & Spreadsheets and many other services that traditionally have been the realm of the desktop moving on to the web, it seems like everything is going to the web.

One of the first things to actually make this move was email. It feels like webmail clients have existed forever. Hotmail was the startup (back before Microsoft owned them) that really brought webmail to mainstream use and since then we’ve seen many other services.

Most notably has been Gmail, which was one of the first mainstream webmail services to bring a user interface built on Ajax technology. This move (and other Ajax interfaces we now see in Yahoo Mail, the beta Hotmail interface and others) has brought the webmail experience pretty much on par with that of desktop clients.

So - with webmail services like Gmail providing such a rich user experience, are desktop email clients even relevant any more? If they are, are their days numbered?

Desktop clients have also come a very long way since the early days of email. Nowadays, desktop clients provide a very rich user experience, with benefits of desktop integration and the ability to integrate with other systems like calendars and complete groupware suites which allow people to work together collaboratively.

But now that webmail services are rapidly bridging that user experience gap, their greatest strength - availability everywhere is starting to mean that webmail can really provide a better service. Unlike a desktop system, where you have to have a client and to set it up, you can literally walk up to virtually any internet-enabled computer to use webmail.

Certainly this is starting to happen in home settings, where people are increasingly choosing not to go with their ISP’s standard mail service and opting for webmail-based solutions. I think it’s fairly clear that unless desktop clients can integrate extremely well with webmail setups, they are likely to become less and less relevant.

The enterprise is a completely different issue, however. Currently, the Microsoft Exchange on the server side and Microsoft Outlook client combination is probably the most dominant setup. While Exchange does provide a webmail client, the experience is arguably not as good as using Outlook itself. In a business setting, it’s also harder to convince a change of system, as migrating a system as important as email is undoubtedly very expensive and the benefits of an alternative system would have to be heavily justified.

What will the situation be in 5 years time?

Inevitably, with the fast paced world of technology, sometime within the next 5 years, these businesses wil start to think about upgrading. If web-based enterprise email solutions like Zimbra for example can continue and provide an extremely compelling web-based groupware solution, Exchange+Outlook could have a serious fight on their hands.

On the residental side of things, I think we’ll probably see a continuing trend of people using webmail rather than their ISP’s POP and SMTP systems in combination with desktop client. Unless something really compelling comes out in the way of desktop systems, the average person will probably just continue how they are now.

At the moment, I actually use both. My primary email account is a Gmail account, but I use Gmail’s POP access functionality to pipe it into Thunderbird on my desktop. I get the benefits of a desktop client (which is a nice local backup) and the ability to check and send my email anywhere. And I’m looking forward to Thunderbird 2 too.