It isn't shot down, it's shot at. This idea is unshotdownable because it's so obvious. If someone thinks that open source end user apps make sense at all (I don't), they have to think about how to make them available on the most widespread platform, which is the web. HTML5 apps do compete with native apps. I'm not using Evolution or Thunderbird, I'm using Gmail. I'm not using OpenOffice, I'm using Google docs & spreadsheets. The only desktop apps I'm using right now are vim, bash and the browser. Vim and bash could just as well live in the browser.
I think Android made one big mistake. And that's to not make the great leap forward to enabling browser apps instead of inventing yet another UI toolkit and off browser runtime. Maybe Chrome OS will be what I'm thinking of and maybe Oracle's case against Dalvik will help Google realise they don't need that Java runtime anyway.
I think Android made one big mistake. And that's to not make the great leap forward to enabling browser apps instead of inventing yet another UI toolkit and off browser runtime. Maybe Chrome OS will be what I'm thinking of and maybe Oracle's case against Dalvik will help Google realise they don't need that Java runtime anyway.