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First, thanks for the interesting article! However, there is one important point I would strongly disagree with, and I think it is a strategically relevant one.
You say that the web has always been an application platform and you welcome MozOpera's backward compatibility focus. I understand this view from someone who is at least as much on the publishing side of things as on the application development side (at least that's what I take from your articles).
But you should be very aware of the fact that there is a huge wave of disgust, anger and frustration with current web client technologies (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) among business application developers. They (and I should really say we) are prepared to switch to anything that comes along and takes away this curse which has been an increasing drag on productivity (and even on fun recently). The reason is partly the history of lacking standards in this area, as you very well know, but also the fact that although the web has always been an application platform, it has never been a good application platform. It has been a fantastic deployment platform but a miserable development platform. Business applications are just not page oriented. A book has pages, an application does not!
Now, I'm not sure what it would mean for the web, if business application clients, that have moved to the web since CGI, are now moving on to something else. Where are they moving? I don't know, but you can be sure they are moving to something that is not based on this old HTML/CSS/JavaScript hodgepodge. I leave it to your own imagination what would be the result of a fight between a clean and powerful UI discription language like XAML and a backwards compatible slightly embellished and even more bloated successor to the much hated HTML/CSS/JavaScript trio supported by 'industry giants' like Mozilla and Opera.
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