[ Thanks to steve
hill for this link. ]
“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…).”