He makes an interesting point about disk latency; but network latency remains, and seems to be getting far worse due to assembling services to render a page. A

He makes an interesting point about disk latency; but network latency remains, and seems to be getting far worse due to assembling services to render a page. Although his implicit point that users care about latency is correct, it may be that they care even more about other things - such as the information richness from combining those services; and indirectly, the entirely new webapps made possible by the flexibility of this modular approach. After all, they've put up with slowness for a long time. e..g historically, each time desktop became faster, users happily allowed it to be absorbed in to GUIs, layers and layers of modules, including C# and... Java. Even if he's right, we might go back to Java the same way we went back to Perl...