An article was mentioned on Slashdot regarding Google's (or Yahoo's) creation of some sort of web-based Office suite. While the story is actually baseless speculation (it is supported as much as the title of this entry is), it did make me pause and contemplate where Google is going next. Consider for a moment that Google's primary innovation hasn't really been new products or technologies, but rather a business model and transactional efficiency that allows them to offer unprecedented amounts of processing, storage and bandwidth for users: Google has managed to make money offering services that most thought prohibitively costly. Google has absolutely redefined the market, and continues to do so with each release.

Given that Google has become a market leader, I see no reason why Google needs to continue to be tied to DHTML. Even with the so-called AJAX, HTML is realistically too coarse for something as rich as an Office suite (don't get me wrong - I was making highly dynamic engine control systems, using "AJAX" style methods, over 5 years ago. Nonetheless it is primarily a document layout technology, and shouldn't be shoehorned into every need). It would be a waste of engineering manpower to attempt to solve that problem with the wrong technologies.

I can entirely foresee Google completely splitting from HTML for some products - Google is one company that could release new services accessible via RDP or some other streaming graphical or vector format, and it would be immediately embraced by the community. If Google didn't leverage an existing technology, but instead invented something new, they would undoubtedly release it as a standard. A real Web 2.0 would be born.