For sure. My objection is that I think that move was more obvious for Google than it was for, say, Microsoft or Apple, who still had a native-mindset and wante

For sure. My objection is that I think that move was more obvious for Google than it was for, say, Microsoft or Apple, who still had a native-mindset and wanted to lock people into their existing platforms. Arguably, Google's move was a response to the threat of native lock in. Once they started, it was easier to execute on than smaller web-centric companies because they had the unique privilege of advertizing the Google Browser on... Google. That web technologies actually became wildly popular for native-style apps probably owes more to the diversification of platforms and difficulty of writing native apps for all of them, otherwise it would have become yet another platform that no one writes apps for. I don't know if Google could or did predict that.