>> I expect this place to calm down and come to its senses and fall back onto some sorts of standards based mechanism that will work across platforms.

Why would Google or Apple allow that? MS never did- everything was sculpted to create advantage for MS OS to the exclusion of all others. They succeeded at first because DOS made them front runner and Windows really did add value. Recently I looked back at just how good Windows 3 was in its day, how WFW was even better and W95 was better still. In the end it's not open standards taking them down: it's Apple and now Google establishing dominance in the mobile space. I agree that's a mobile-centric view... we can agree to disagree because my expectation is that mobile will come to dominate the whole UI sooner than we might expect, including whatever we use instead of desktops. The nature of dominance will be interesting: as of Q1 the top 3 smartphone providers are Samsung, Apple and LG. There are two Korean makers there and they both "slightly" modify Android to add functionality. Sheer volume means that if it's rational to write for iOS, it's rational to write for the specific hardware in an equally prevalent Android device. Once makers start incentivizing this, it's game on.