Aza Raskin, President of Humanized, (& son of the late Jef Raskin) gave a talk recently at Google about the Death of the Desktop. Long at 1:26, but interesting to watch.

What's needed is a universal method of accessing functionality: a way of harnessing the power of services without the need for application developers to explicitly support them. I'll be demonstrating such a method.

The talk demonstrates that a ZUI plus a universal method of accessing functionality spells the death of the application-centric computing model and the desktop-design paradigms.

Enso, an application that Humanized produces is a "new" command-line driven application that takes advantage

I like the spirit of the command/service idea for geeks like me, but I'm not convinced the masses would want it. That's not to say that one couldn't make a ton of money off the small segment of the population that would buy the software.

I don't want to become a slave to the command-line. I don't want to remember lots of 'commands'. The trick is how to not make me think about commands, yet give me the power of commands, or services as Aza calls them.

Jump to 1:05:07 to see an interesting demo with zoom. WPF anybody?