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I disagree that the web tech should be owned by a company. It seems to me the "committee" has done a much better job the Microsoft alone, so far. But if there was to be such company, it should clearly be Google. Both Apple and Microsoft don't really have their interests aligned with the web. They make money from hardware or from selling OS licenses. By default, that means that their #1 priority is to do that - and in many cases at the expense of the web. If they would own it, and they would ever have a conflict of interest between the web and their main platform, they would choose their main platform. But Google have their interests much more aligned with the web. They care about making the web faster, more advanced, and so on, because they indirectly make money from that. But of course, even Google owning the tech would bring it's own set of problems, and this will happen with any company owning it. Any company who would own it would "corrupt" it in some way, if only to be better for their own products or less good for the others. That's why the Internet is decentralized in many ways, and it's the beauty of the Internet. We've had many closed platforms before, but none like the Internet. And the Internet is the greatest one by far, and I doubt it's by coincidence. If you look at other "cross-platform" technologies, like Flash for example, they ultimately fail, because a single owner can't make sure it works on absolutely every platform and browsers, with no problems. It requires too much work. And again, that's one of the beauties of the web technologies, that every browser has to do their own implementation of the spec as good as possible, and compete with each other for that. One more thing. Yes, iOS and Android did help bring back to popularity the native applications, but this is not an "ultimate" win. It's just a cycle. We've had native apps when the PC's emerged, then we had web-apps becoming popular. Then the smartphones emerged with slow processors (compared to PC's) and native apps started being popular again. But HTML5 is already starting to become popular on mobiles, and with at least 3-4 platforms, you can be sure the web will "win", at least this cycle, until a new low-performance tech comes along and native apps are back. |