Keep in mind that the big success of the current Google CEO is ChromeOS. Basically a minimum OS booting straight to a browser. As "everything" is supposed to l

Keep in mind that the big success of the current Google CEO is ChromeOS. Basically a minimum OS booting straight to a browser. As "everything" is supposed to live inside a browser window, there "naturally" needs to be rich APIs for accessing whatever the user may decide to plug into ports or their wireless equivalents. We are going full circle here, with the web "browser" becoming the new leased line terminal. Keep in mind that at the end of the mainframe era, some "terminals" had local hardware that could rival a micro-computer. This is why the X protocol included support for printing, as the printer would be hooked up to the X "terminal" and not the mainframe (DEC had their own wire protocols for talking either to terminals or printers for doing bitmap and vector graphics). Everything old is new again, and i wonder if i will live long enough to witness some rainbowhaired dev blog (or whatever it will be called at the time) about how they are gleefully ripping out all this cruft from the "soon" to be retired web protocol.