Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O
by Tim O’Reilly
“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.”