Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O - O'Reilly Radar - 0 views
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Perrine GROSSET on 21 Sep 09May 27 2009 listen print Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 64 "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. "We knew then that the web had won," he said. "What was once thought impossible is now commonplace." Google doesn't want to repeat that mistake, and as a result, he said, "we're betting big on HTML 5." Vic pointed out that the rate of browser innovation is accelerating, with new browser releases nearly every other month. The slide below, from early in Vic's talk, shows the progress towards the level of UI functionality found in desktop apps through adoption of HTML 5 features in browsers. This looks like one of Clayton Christensen's classic "disruptive innovation vs sustaining innovation" graphs. It's also fascinating to see how mobile browsers are in the forefront of the innovation.