And now everybody wants its own slice

Of HTML 5, of course! At the moment HTML 5 is still a rich promise, but neither Adobe nor Microsoft want to renounce their own slice of the cake. I can still remember the loads of articles talking about Adobe vs Apple and Adobe trying to obstruct the works for the new HTML specification. Adobe was so doubtful about it that Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen dismissed HTML 5 as being “unable to deliver a consistent user experience across different Web browsers” and predicted that “a decade will pass before the specification gets standardized”. Sometimes fear is so hard to hide…. But tahnkfully now things have changed, fear disappeared and the new must are trust and committment.

And so came the support for the WebM project and the HTML 5 Pack for CS5 suite. But Adobe never stops thinking about it customer and so here it comes directly from the MAX 2010 the great idea: develop your own applications in Flash and thanks to one click only you will get a full featured copy of it into HTML 5. Woooow..that’s amazing! But, just one moment please. Let me think about it. Why should Adobe promote such a tool? Isn’t Adobe investing tons of dollars on Flash? Yes, but you remember, things have changed. The answer is simple: finally Adobe realized that the Flash Player is not a fully universal runtime and never will be. If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. Or better to HTML 5. So Adobe reviewed its strategies and now wants to provide its customers with a full suite of products ready for HTML 5 development. Flash and HTML 5 will coexist. If you can’t kill them, make friends with them, said someone.

Could Microsoft just wait and see? Not at all. As a matter of fact if Flash should worry about HTML 5 so shoud do Silverlight. But the world should not be scared, Microsoft is really committed to HTML 5 too. As a matter of fact it seems that Silverlight won’t be no more the cross-platform runtime for RIAs as it were in the original plans. Also Silverlight will live and will coexist with HTML 5, but it seems that it will become part of the development plaftorm for Windows Phone.

So now everybody loves HTML 5 and most of all everybody wants its own slice of the cake.
It’s just a hunch, but now it seems that everyone is implicitly claiming that HTML 5 is the one and only real cross-platform technology to come. Who would ever have thought that?