Desktop will be the next arena,again

I can recall clearly in the age of Windows 98,we have an option in Windows--Active desktop,which is based on IE,provides us with the service of bringing up-to-date information to us when we launched the system.
But it ended up in a failure,due to the low capacity of machines at that time and the huge amount of flaws of IE.
We may have forgotten it entirely,but big company can't desktop is a great potential market,they can get more from it by providing more than Active Desktop years ago.
A few days ago,Yahoo! bought Konfabulator,which is a base of desktop applications.Konfabulator is greatly influenced by the Apple culture(you can judge from the website settings and styles).Actually it support both the Mac OS and Windows Systems.
I've never paid enough attentions to these applied desktop stuffs,but now I was told that you can make search and play games,view pictures,get the latest news by using these small widgets.
How amazing, what else did we do except these things? Yahoo is doing things Google attempted to do but still can't achieve,Gmail and Google Suggest are both things of this kind but they can not be separated from browser, and MSN's RSS screen saver are just the same thing from a different aspect.
What matters most is not just a Konfabulator,but the Developers inside the project,Google excels in the search area because it's open and it allows and encourages develpopers and geeks to participate and create more that what they can bring to the users.And it's just what Yahoo lack before,now all Konfabulator developers belong to Yahoo,you can submit your widget and you can share the idea of getting things better with the author,it's the vision of open-source project and the way Firefox is using to enhance itself,so Yahoo must be ambitious in the future..
Ooh...I must say that I am confused as well as inspired by the current development of web which is greatly fueled by these great companies--IE 7 bring the RSS to the core of the system,Google may be preparing for GooOS or GOffice or even GooPC,and Yahoo is changing our desktop from a place to store the most frequently used tools to a place that we can handle all our jobs..
Maybe eventually we only need two things in your PC a desktop which is integrated in the system and a browser.
As to Google and MSN,Yahoo's ambition means a tougher war in the future as to me,it means PC can be more funny.