You are misattributing the cause. It’s not because they’re web-based, it’s because they aren’t *really^ Word, Excel, etc. I’ve shot myself in the foot one too many times with the web-based Office suite. There’s a reason there’s a nice big button to bounce you to the desktop applications - for when you need to do something they didn’t bother putting in the web version.
Eh... I think it's both. A lot of end-users don't understand understand what a web browser is. The older crowd is completely weirded out about running an app in their browser.
