I just finished attending a three day workshop on developing standalone GUI applications with this awesome Java applications framework that you've never heard of. Actually, that's not true. You've heard of it but thought it was an IDE--NetBeans. Unfortunately, the amazing applications framework has been hitched to the NetBeans IDE wagon which, for better or worse, has almost no market share. (I know how NetBeans users feel because I use Intellij, both of which are swamped by eclipse users.)
I've built a number of applications with Swing, but Swing is just so primitive. Every GUI I build has to reimplement all of the usual application lifecycle and menu stuff. No one uses swing partly for this reason. Unfortunately, I understand that Sun now Oracle uses the lack of users as a justification to dump it. If you're old enough to remember the birth of Java, you'll recall that all the excitement about it came down to one word: Applets. That is pretty funny because of course no one uses it for applets. Why not? AWT, the windowing library at the time, was terrible. Swing was meant to fix this and, years later after they fixed the speed issues, it's actually okay (though it still pretty low level). The problem was and is that it's not an application framework and we build applications not widgets.
Personally, I much prefer using a GUI app sitting on my machine rather than a web app (pretty funny since I'm teaching a graduate course in web systems and algorithms the semester). Anyone who's tried to use google's spreadsheet or document editor online know what I'm talking about.
I'm sure all of the 22-year-old "VPs of engineering" lurking in the coffee shops in the mission district of San Francisco think I'm just an old guy. It's true. I'm old, but that doesn't mean that don't want to use good software.
There are good reasons not to build web application sometimes. Aside from the difficulty of building rich clients beyond some gee-whiz JavaScript, the first thing I have to do with a web application is come up with a Web server somewhere. This exposes me to security issues and I have to figure out how to get two computers to communicate instead of using method calls.