Web Platform is Accelerating

The types of applications/interactivity we're seeing on the web continue to become more sophisticated. I found this chart insightful showing how the underlying web technologies and infrastructure are becoming more powerful - this tied with the trend of moving more applications to cloud/server based platforms paints an exciting future for the connected world we're living in.

Read how Google is betting on HTML 5 to support initiatives like Wave while also trying to avoid mistakes made in the past by competitors (ahem Microsoft):

"Never underestimate the web," says Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra in his keynote at Google I/O this morning. He goes on to tell the story of a meeting he remembers when he was VP of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft five years ago. "We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. There was this small company called Keyhole, which made this most fantastic geo-visualization software for Windows. This was the kind of software we always used to prove to ourselves that there were things that could never be done on the web." A few months later, Google acquired Keyhole, and shortly thereafter released Google Maps with satellite view.

My favorite part of the article is when Google's VP of Engineering realized that web applications will beat out traditional client software -- do you agree? 

"We knew then that the web had won," he said. "What was once thought impossible is now commonplace."

Read the rest of the article here.