[hnfong]

I wouldn't say it's foresight, more like recognizing a trend.

By 2006 I worked as an intern in a company that made rich web based apps, basically a competitor to Google Spreadsheets if you will. There were numerous startups doing similar stuff. It was basically a mainstream thing.

At the time I remember a bunch of people mocking up desktop environments inside a browser -- not necessarily useful but it was one of the fun things to do with the capabilities of the browser. AJAX was the cool tech that everybody wanted to use.

I don't think anyone at the time could have foreseen that Javascript would become the sophisticated mess with new frameworks displacing the existing ones every other year, but browser-side programming displacing traditional UI toolkits was well on the way by then.