The Distributed Application Platform
There are still many hurdles that distributed applications have to overcome before they can replace standalone systems that have been in place like word processors, for example we have a distributed web application named Word_online that has the application on a server in the US and you are typing an article. The power goes out and you loose your work, the cat jumps on the desk while you were in process of saving and you accidentally hit close, the article is gone. That is one of the downsides of distributed web applications which is still better done on stand-alone programs. Any distributed system is dependent on the internet and say the gateway crashes while you were doing something, everything turns to air.