"I doubt anybody expected it. Even after seeing AJAX (which was ironically started by Microsoft…), very few would have bet that Javascript would become quite so important. Javascript is the only really widespread, multiplatform solution the modern IT world has seen. And yet, it made it. Google Documents is an office suite which runs in your browser — and it’s not even the best one. And that’s only the beginning: the world is absolutely full of software — and I am talking about full blown software — which will run for you wherever you are.
"The few readers who were here in the mid 90s will have a very string deja-vu feeling right now: this is precisely what Java tried to do back then, when Windows had just won the “PC operating system war” against OS/2, and Java was proposed by Sun as an emergency exit: a platform where the operating system didn’t matter at all; no wonder Microsoft did anything and everything to shoot it down! (Although Sun did a pretty good job itself, by not releasing it under a free license and hanging on to it way too tightly...)."
