This is Kumula's paradigm. This page describes Kumula's design philosophy.
There's no reason why offices should have to use only one platform, and absolutely no reason why they should use the platform from Redmond. Give everybody in the office their choice, let the CEO use the latest iMac, a Windows PC for the secretary and when the network admin wants a Linux box, let him use this.
Native applications give users a better user interface, faster feedback for their actions and better access to functions via shortcuts. Web based applications could make also a good interface and also shortcuts, but if they did they would lose their biggest advantage: platform independence.
The most important key feature of Kumula. There's a lot of business software out there, providing almost all functions in one single application. Kumula is designed to be a suite of (smaller) programs, where each program does the work it's made for. Almost like the system tools of etablished Unix systems. Give users the feeling about what the program does, how it's done and why.
Each Kumula application is designed to be flexible. Features that could be used by different programs are provided in the Kumula base library. For the applications as much functions as possible are realised in modules/plugins. This gives the big advantage that users of specific branches can adjust the programs to their special needs.