Platform wars are about to break out again. What am I saying, they never really ceased. Well, some believed that HTML5 will be the "silver bullet" of modern client architectures that will unify the application across all platforms. Honestly, this didn’t really look convincing enough, as it would mean denying platform specifics - all the distinguishers and win factors between the technologies - vendors would never approve that. Anyway, it seems that this consideration is getting more and more pointless as HTML5 is starting to get first serious blows.
First of them was dealt by anyone else but Zuck - father of Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg. Here (http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/) you can find him claiming that:
Facebook’s "… biggest mistake was betting too much on HTML5", so they are moving towards native applications on chosen platforms.
What does it mean? Nothing and everything. Facebook is quite an influencing player and this opinion won’t be ignored, it may actually set some kind of trend. It may also have some implications on Microsoft - they were trying to remain quite smart with WinRT by covering Windows 8 application development in two streams:
- HTML5 + CSS3 + JS
- XAML + C#/C++/VB
Microsoft’s native path is Windows-only and it has no "common denominator" with other native platforms (like Android and iOS), so HTML5 was their “safety belt” (if someone has already invested in making HTML5 app, releasing it to Windows Store should be cheap and easy), now it seems that it may offer less safety then assumed…