As long as the state runs schools, they are going to be a customer for textbooks. Since they are going to be among the largest customers, the textbooks are going to be de-facto government-commissioned. No for-profit publisher is going to stand up to their biggest customer if their biggest customer wants something changed, no matter how ludicrous. The only real question is whether it is cheaper for the state to outright buy the content and then pit printers against one another if they need hard copies(in addition to making it available online), or whether it is more efficient to let the private sector write the whole thing, and pay a per-book charge.
The latter course is traditional; but there are some fairly strong arguments to be made in favor of the former, particularly for some of the less volatile subject areas.
(Incidentally, the above link is on the sane side of the lunatic fringe. The real crazies are the ones who think that Newton was divinely inspired, and they don't want none of Einstien's "Relativist" jew-physics... Yes, there are people who think that the "theory of relativity" is somehow connected to "cultural relativism")
Almost nobody(given that "PCMCIA" officially became "Cardbus" somewhere in the 1995-97 region, depending on whether you want to count from the release of the spec or the broad adoption, and that both are now pretty well superceded by Expresscard); but ExpressCard/54 is virtually the same size, so the point stands. For that matter, it would probably be even easier with ExpressCard, since those slots natively provide a USB2 connection, which virtually all modern phones use as their data/charge interface anyway, possibly behind a funny non-standard connector.
(Unless your phone declines to support it, or your carrier somehow locks it, or your device doesn't understand it. In any case, though, it exists.)
Even if it didn't exist, SIM cards aren't exactly expensive devices. Wholesale price lists aren't just leaping to the top of my google searches at present; but, based on the prices quoted for new prepaid SIMs, any carrier could easily afford to provide extra SIMs for $5-$10 a pop, tying them to an existing account.
The other cool feature of the dispersants is that they are, themselves, strongly suspected of being quite toxic to certain oceanic species. Like, say, soft corals, of which there is a rather large collection in the vicinity.
They are quite good for keeping the oil where it won't show up on satellite/aircraft photos, and possibly off the beaches where the press would otherwise have a field day taking pictures of oil-soaked baby animals; but they aren't something you do because you care about the marine ecosystem.
I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine, goes by the name of "learned helplessness".
With the exception of the occasional mulishly idealistic college student, most people don't take long to stop caring much about things over which they have absolutely no power.
There was. Blue was the last of the "human relevant" colors to be developed into something commercially viable, though, by way of historical trivia, the extremely early, very impractical, silicon carbide devices were blue LEDs(by "human relevant", I mean to exclude exotic application-specific stuff like far-ultraviolet or something.) Somehow, unbearably bright blue then became a symbol of "high tech" among electronics manufacturers with dubious taste.
Is that integration between phones, smart or otherwise, and computers is not really a technical problem at all; but a business one. Yes, there are some technical details(fiddly bluetooth profile stuff, details of USB networking, etc.); but nothing that competent engineers can't work through, and largely have.
The big issue is that carriers, for the most part, absolutely don't want phone/computer local connections to be useful. And, to the degree that they are willing to let them be, they still want to be paid for it. The real control freaks don't even want stuff like bluetooth OBEX to work, so that you have to get pictures off the phone by MMS ($.50 a pop, ka-ching!) and ringtones and things on to the phone from some walled garden store($2.99/ea, ka-ching!). Even among the more moderate, most of them want you to pay more if you are using the phone as an internet connection for a full PC, even if the phone is a smartphone with an existing data plan.
You can, already, get all kinds of useful integration between PCs and phones, with no stupid proprietary hardware bundling nonsense; but you often have to buy unsubsidized handsets(and then pair them with voice/data plans that are priced to include paying off a handset subsidy) and either pay extra or risk TOS disconnection if you do any serious data tethering.
This is reminds me of seeing stories about this device a while back. A "portable DVR" that would dock to record shows, and then be removable to watch them out and about. Incredibly stupid idea(Why would you want your DVR's capacity to be constrained by a portable form factor, when gigantic 3.5 inch drives cost nearly nothing? Why would you want a DVR that can't record shows when you are out of the house? Why tie the lifetime of a DVR, that should be able to pretty much sit there and Just Work for years, possibly with the occasional HDD upgrade/replacement to the lifespan of a delicate mobile device?). However, the simple, obvious technical solution(make the DVR networked, transfer recordings to whatever mobile device you want) is largely deemed unacceptable by DRM and control-hungry cable companies, so you get this really ugly hack. Similarly, connecting a phone to a computer using existing ubiquitous technologies should be fucking child's play. There is absolutely no need for any proprietary bundle solution, except because of carrier control freakery.
Depending on how the economics shake out, it can pretty easily be a good thing, or at least an indifferent one.
Generally, it is cheaper to make a given feature standard than it is to make it optional(obviously, making it unavailable is cheaper still). Standard means that you can solder it right onto the mainboard, or include it on the die, means no separate inventory channel to track, and greater economies of scale. For these reasons, once a given feature achieves some level of popularity, it shifts from being optional to being standard(remember the days when motherboards didn't include at least one NIC and some sort of audio, or the days when an FPU was an optional part, or the brief period when your 3D card was a separate board that went next to your 2D card?)
This does mean that, for users sufficiently outside the common profile, that redundant components get shipped. Audiophiles end up with unused onboard sound. Gamers end up with unused onboard video(though, with the rise of demand-based graphics switching, this is becoming less serious, since having a dinky integrated GPU to paint your desktop and only have the fire-breathing discrete board power up for games is a good thing). For server stuff, you disable the onboard Realtec crap and get a real NIC. However, given the gigantic economies of scale in the electronics business, it'd likely cost you more to get "only what you need" than it would to get "what joe average needs + my chosen option cards", even though the latter represents slightly more silicon and connectors and stuff.
"Our unification of Platform is more powerful a weapon than any Android on earth. Our enemies shall fragment themselves to death and we will bury them in their own version proliferation."
Is that the guy who decided to go up against Steve did such a tepid job of it.
If you really feel like trying to piss Jobs off for his control-freakery and insistence on building Computers Where The Trains Run on Time, you don't just whine about "freedom", you throw his past as an ostensibly anti-establishment maverick in his face.
"So, Steve, you finally got rid of those slots that Woz was always sneaking in to things, and have even managed to build a (walled) garden of pure ideology, where each user may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory runtimes and confusing languages..."
You basically answered your own question or, at least, gave the seed of the answer. Microsoft, (largely correctly), sees enterprises and organizations with complex requirements and/or a substantial Office-based legacy stack as being substantially locked in. This is why enterprise versions of Office cost as much, per seat, as they do, and why Microsoft's answer to the demand for better networked collaboration at the enterprise level is basically "It's SharePoint, and yup, that'll cost you, or nothing, bitches." For some of these outfits, pretty much any program that isn't feature-for-feature compatible(including binary compatibility with plugins and macros and stuff) just isn't going to cut it, Google certainly won't.
However, enterprises in that situation are by no means the entire market. For other market segments, Google has a dangerously appealing product(in my observations of nontechnical users, for instance, they find that having their documents "just there" wherever they sit down to be a revelation. Unless you are an office drone somewhere where IT has dumped serious time and effort into making it all magically work, or your techie nephew spent the afternoon playing with Dropbox or something on all the computers you use, you don't get that with Office, even if you pay for one of the fancy versions). Further, the history of technology is littered with admittedly superior technologies that were gradually eaten from below by their "definitely not as good; but a lot cheaper/more versatile" competitors. Given that, at one point, MS was one of those competitors, they probably know this lesson.
If Google gets a viable toehold in these easier markets, this gives them plenty of time to gradually evolve their way up, picking off whatever targets happen to be softest at the time. If their document fidelity isn't good enough now, it'll probably be a bit better next year, and a bit better the year after that. Since software costs basically nothing to reproduce, the larger your audience, the cheaper (per customer) implementing a feature or improvement is.
There is probably a secondary reason as well. Even if Google's Docs ends up being a dead end, and gets quietly put on life support, and relegated to light list-making duties forever, the general lesson that people want better networked collaboration is inescapable. Microsoft will want to deliver that(though they will probably prefer to do it with an installed Office version and SharePoint Server, and fat licence fees for both). Rolling out a web-based Office 2010, cheapskate edition, allows them to test and refine their interfaces, models, and ways of doing things for distributed collaboration. Since the users won't be paying customers, they will be able to take some risks with them(and, if dissatisfaction arises, letting the message be "Oh, the web version is feature limited by design. Upgrade to Office 2010 for the Full Office Experience.") and figure out what they want future iterations of their enterprise collaboration stuff to feel like.
I suspect the issue is preservation of "change tracking" metadata between Docs and Word, rather than change tracking in Docs, or change tracking in Word.
I further suspect that this is a difficult thing because(in addition to probably being crufty, complex, and not as well documented as it might be), "change tracking" is partially a strictly technical problem, and partly a UI/design philosophy problem. It would be, by no means, a surprise to learn that Word and Docs have distinct approaches that simply may not be fully commensurate with one another.
Consider the analogy of programs/UIs that are basically folder hierarchy based, vs. programs/UIs that are basically metadata "tag" based. There are some basic technical challenges you would run into if you wanted to make one approach play nicely with the other(ie. parsing the metadata properly); but most of your challenges would be more about stylistic decisions concerning how best to bodge one style into the other's conventions. Should you parse the metadata and create "virtual folders" that echo a sensible folder hierarchy organization of those files? If you have a hierarchical folder tree, how best to turn that information into meaningful tags?, etc.
HTML5 advocates should really give an option for content security aka DRM, that is how real World works for now...
Even if they wanted to, how would you propose that they do that? It would be trivial enough to add a "donotallowworthlesspirateusertocopyonpainofdeath" option to the video tag; but that would only be as useful as the various browser's enforcement of it. You might get some vendors on board(though that would hardly be a given. The FOSS guys hate DRM on principle, and the corporates already have their own DRM systems, and it isn't clear that they want the competition); but you would have absolutely no way to go after the ones that refused, or the fly-by-night redistribution of copies of firefox compiled with the -ignore_DRM_flags option set.
If you observe real world DRM systems, they are all either single-party(WMDRM, Fairplay, etc.) or multi-vendor standards controlled by IP cartels bristling with patents that you must license in order to implement whatever the attached spec is(CSS, HDCP, AACS). HTML5 is in neither position. There would be absolutely no way to stop the proliferation of implementations compliant enough to receive the video; but noncompliant with respect to denying it to the user(good luck, for instance, having your site distinguish between a good-faith/best-effort DRM implementing webkit build, and a slightly tweaked build that reports exactly the same ID strings but "accidentally" lets the precious premium content sit in a snoopable memory location...
On closed platforms, where undesired binaries can simply be excluded, it'd be trivial enough; but there would be Just No Way on PCs generally.
I think that to focus on the "curated" aspect really misses(or obfuscates) a critical and ugly point.
Consider the following analogy: You want your house to be aesthetically pleasing and pleasant to use; but know fuck-all about color matching and picking furniture. So, you hire an interior decorator. They "curate" your space and emit a list of suggestions. You can then make it so, or not. On the other hand, if you go to a museum, the curator's decisions are not suggestions, and they are generally tailored to fit the desired audience as a whole, not necessarily you. You cannot add, remove, or substitute anything. Your only choice is to attend the museum or not.
In computing terms, the "interior decorator" situation is basically equivalent to the OEM providing a set of sane defaults, chosen for some mixture of security, ease of use, power, and cost. You can pick your interior decorator and, if you wish, you can deviate from their suggestions.
The "museum curator" option, on the other hand, is the iDevice/carrier lockdown situation. You can either take it or leave it; but if you take it, that's it. the OEM retains cryptographic control over "your" property forever.
The big difference is whether your "curator" is providing a list of suggestions, or a list of orders. The former, frankly, is something that OEMs(particularly the wintel guys) really ought to do a lot more and a lot better. Sane, secure, usable defaults are a good thing. The customer shouldn't have to blow the stock image to hell and rebuild from scratch just to get a desktop worth using. However, any set of defaults that doesn't include a "screw this, I'll do it myself and take the consequences" button, somewhere, that allows you to reject advice and do your own thing is ultimately invidious and will inevitably be used as a tool of rent-seeking(as in consoles, where the OEM extracts a tithe for the privilege of being allowed to sell programs that run on the hardware, or as in the App Store) and likely censorship and all sorts of other fun stuff.
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
I think that it's just an idiom. Or, possibly, a phrase that was, at one time, correct under current usage rules, and has outlasted that set of usage rules.
If something "has a ways to go" this means that it is a significant distance from where it needs to be. Occasionally, it contains a polite, if slightly pointed, suggestion that it may never get there.
I honestly don't understand how an anecdote about a seriously fucked server setup is relevant in the slightest to the pros or cons of "HTML web apps" or their development.
With HTML, whether the shiniest of web 2.0 or the seriously old-school stuff, there is clear separation between the client(where "standards" such as they are, matter) and the server, which can do absolutely whatever it likes, so long as it responds correctly to a few HTTP messages.
If you want to deliver a webapp, the development of your client component is, indeed, somewhat constrained by the fact that "web standards" are more evolved than designed, and are somewhat inconsistently implemented. If you want to discuss the cons of web-apps, horror stories in this vein are the anecdote to use. If you want to discuss the pros, heroic tales of multiplatform, install-free deployment are to be used.
On the server side, though, the vices and virtues of web standards(aside from seriously uncontroversial stuff like TCP/IP and HTTP GET) are basically irrelevant. It's your server. You can do whatever you want to deliver HTML, CSS, and javascript, and interpret responses from your clients. Totally in-house stack? If you feel like it. Modestly customized OSS job? Sure. Some single-vendor enterprise development solution? If that is how you roll. The fact that somebody's web-dev fucked up and then disappeared just seems completely irrelevant(can you think of any type of development, application or otherwise, where "the developer fucked up, then disappeared, and we had to call somebody else in to do a mixture of archeology and pacification" has ever been a good thing?)
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As long as the state runs schools, they are going to be a customer for textbooks. Since they are going to be among the largest customers, the textbooks are going to be de-facto government-commissioned. No for-profit publisher is going to stand up to their biggest customer if their biggest customer wants something changed, no matter how ludicrous. The only real question is whether it is cheaper for the state to outright buy the content and then pit printers against one another if they need hard copies(in addition to making it available online), or whether it is more efficient to let the private sector write the whole thing, and pay a per-book charge.
The latter course is traditional; but there are some fairly strong arguments to be made in favor of the former, particularly for some of the less volatile subject areas.
I think that that is why he proposed having state college faculty write the stuff...
Republican Jesus would shoot your commie ass for saying that.
Incidentally, though, some, er.. fine conservative minds have taken up the challenge of eradicating the taint of liberalism from the bible...
Oh, you crazy optimists...
(Incidentally, the above link is on the sane side of the lunatic fringe. The real crazies are the ones who think that Newton was divinely inspired, and they don't want none of Einstien's "Relativist" jew-physics... Yes, there are people who think that the "theory of relativity" is somehow connected to "cultural relativism")
Are you seriously suggesting that curriculum should be an exercise in majoritarian mythology, rather than a best-effort/historical-evidence thing?
Should we replace bridge inspections with votes about whether or not they are going to fall down, as well?
"Whatever happens, we have got the Gatling gun and they have not..."
Luckily, with most electric blankets, the "dangerously cheap resistive heater" heuristic applies: If it isn't on fire, it probably isn't on.
Only equivalent if you have a serious ego...
Almost nobody(given that "PCMCIA" officially became "Cardbus" somewhere in the 1995-97 region, depending on whether you want to count from the release of the spec or the broad adoption, and that both are now pretty well superceded by Expresscard); but ExpressCard/54 is virtually the same size, so the point stands. For that matter, it would probably be even easier with ExpressCard, since those slots natively provide a USB2 connection, which virtually all modern phones use as their data/charge interface anyway, possibly behind a funny non-standard connector.
No problem.
(Unless your phone declines to support it, or your carrier somehow locks it, or your device doesn't understand it. In any case, though, it exists.)
Even if it didn't exist, SIM cards aren't exactly expensive devices. Wholesale price lists aren't just leaping to the top of my google searches at present; but, based on the prices quoted for new prepaid SIMs, any carrier could easily afford to provide extra SIMs for $5-$10 a pop, tying them to an existing account.
The other cool feature of the dispersants is that they are, themselves, strongly suspected of being quite toxic to certain oceanic species. Like, say, soft corals, of which there is a rather large collection in the vicinity.
They are quite good for keeping the oil where it won't show up on satellite/aircraft photos, and possibly off the beaches where the press would otherwise have a field day taking pictures of oil-soaked baby animals; but they aren't something you do because you care about the marine ecosystem.
I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine, goes by the name of "learned helplessness".
With the exception of the occasional mulishly idealistic college student, most people don't take long to stop caring much about things over which they have absolutely no power.
There was. Blue was the last of the "human relevant" colors to be developed into something commercially viable, though, by way of historical trivia, the extremely early, very impractical, silicon carbide devices were blue LEDs(by "human relevant", I mean to exclude exotic application-specific stuff like far-ultraviolet or something.) Somehow, unbearably bright blue then became a symbol of "high tech" among electronics manufacturers with dubious taste.
Is that integration between phones, smart or otherwise, and computers is not really a technical problem at all; but a business one. Yes, there are some technical details(fiddly bluetooth profile stuff, details of USB networking, etc.); but nothing that competent engineers can't work through, and largely have.
The big issue is that carriers, for the most part, absolutely don't want phone/computer local connections to be useful. And, to the degree that they are willing to let them be, they still want to be paid for it. The real control freaks don't even want stuff like bluetooth OBEX to work, so that you have to get pictures off the phone by MMS ($.50 a pop, ka-ching!) and ringtones and things on to the phone from some walled garden store($2.99/ea, ka-ching!). Even among the more moderate, most of them want you to pay more if you are using the phone as an internet connection for a full PC, even if the phone is a smartphone with an existing data plan.
You can, already, get all kinds of useful integration between PCs and phones, with no stupid proprietary hardware bundling nonsense; but you often have to buy unsubsidized handsets(and then pair them with voice/data plans that are priced to include paying off a handset subsidy) and either pay extra or risk TOS disconnection if you do any serious data tethering.
This is reminds me of seeing stories about this device a while back. A "portable DVR" that would dock to record shows, and then be removable to watch them out and about. Incredibly stupid idea(Why would you want your DVR's capacity to be constrained by a portable form factor, when gigantic 3.5 inch drives cost nearly nothing? Why would you want a DVR that can't record shows when you are out of the house? Why tie the lifetime of a DVR, that should be able to pretty much sit there and Just Work for years, possibly with the occasional HDD upgrade/replacement to the lifespan of a delicate mobile device?). However, the simple, obvious technical solution(make the DVR networked, transfer recordings to whatever mobile device you want) is largely deemed unacceptable by DRM and control-hungry cable companies, so you get this really ugly hack. Similarly, connecting a phone to a computer using existing ubiquitous technologies should be fucking child's play. There is absolutely no need for any proprietary bundle solution, except because of carrier control freakery.
Depending on how the economics shake out, it can pretty easily be a good thing, or at least an indifferent one.
Generally, it is cheaper to make a given feature standard than it is to make it optional(obviously, making it unavailable is cheaper still). Standard means that you can solder it right onto the mainboard, or include it on the die, means no separate inventory channel to track, and greater economies of scale. For these reasons, once a given feature achieves some level of popularity, it shifts from being optional to being standard(remember the days when motherboards didn't include at least one NIC and some sort of audio, or the days when an FPU was an optional part, or the brief period when your 3D card was a separate board that went next to your 2D card?)
This does mean that, for users sufficiently outside the common profile, that redundant components get shipped. Audiophiles end up with unused onboard sound. Gamers end up with unused onboard video(though, with the rise of demand-based graphics switching, this is becoming less serious, since having a dinky integrated GPU to paint your desktop and only have the fire-breathing discrete board power up for games is a good thing). For server stuff, you disable the onboard Realtec crap and get a real NIC. However, given the gigantic economies of scale in the electronics business, it'd likely cost you more to get "only what you need" than it would to get "what joe average needs + my chosen option cards", even though the latter represents slightly more silicon and connectors and stuff.
Of course, if he responds:
"Our unification of Platform is more powerful a weapon than any Android on earth. Our enemies shall fragment themselves to death and we will bury them in their own version proliferation."
Then you know you just got punked...
Is that the guy who decided to go up against Steve did such a tepid job of it.
If you really feel like trying to piss Jobs off for his control-freakery and insistence on building Computers Where The Trains Run on Time, you don't just whine about "freedom", you throw his past as an ostensibly anti-establishment maverick in his face.
"So, Steve, you finally got rid of those slots that Woz was always sneaking in to things, and have even managed to build a (walled) garden of pure ideology, where each user may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory runtimes and confusing languages..."
releasing a stripped-down version
...
You basically answered your own question or, at least, gave the seed of the answer. Microsoft, (largely correctly), sees enterprises and organizations with complex requirements and/or a substantial Office-based legacy stack as being substantially locked in. This is why enterprise versions of Office cost as much, per seat, as they do, and why Microsoft's answer to the demand for better networked collaboration at the enterprise level is basically "It's SharePoint, and yup, that'll cost you, or nothing, bitches." For some of these outfits, pretty much any program that isn't feature-for-feature compatible(including binary compatibility with plugins and macros and stuff) just isn't going to cut it, Google certainly won't.
However, enterprises in that situation are by no means the entire market. For other market segments, Google has a dangerously appealing product(in my observations of nontechnical users, for instance, they find that having their documents "just there" wherever they sit down to be a revelation. Unless you are an office drone somewhere where IT has dumped serious time and effort into making it all magically work, or your techie nephew spent the afternoon playing with Dropbox or something on all the computers you use, you don't get that with Office, even if you pay for one of the fancy versions). Further, the history of technology is littered with admittedly superior technologies that were gradually eaten from below by their "definitely not as good; but a lot cheaper/more versatile" competitors. Given that, at one point, MS was one of those competitors, they probably know this lesson.
If Google gets a viable toehold in these easier markets, this gives them plenty of time to gradually evolve their way up, picking off whatever targets happen to be softest at the time. If their document fidelity isn't good enough now, it'll probably be a bit better next year, and a bit better the year after that. Since software costs basically nothing to reproduce, the larger your audience, the cheaper (per customer) implementing a feature or improvement is.
There is probably a secondary reason as well. Even if Google's Docs ends up being a dead end, and gets quietly put on life support, and relegated to light list-making duties forever, the general lesson that people want better networked collaboration is inescapable. Microsoft will want to deliver that(though they will probably prefer to do it with an installed Office version and SharePoint Server, and fat licence fees for both). Rolling out a web-based Office 2010, cheapskate edition, allows them to test and refine their interfaces, models, and ways of doing things for distributed collaboration. Since the users won't be paying customers, they will be able to take some risks with them(and, if dissatisfaction arises, letting the message be "Oh, the web version is feature limited by design. Upgrade to Office 2010 for the Full Office Experience.") and figure out what they want future iterations of their enterprise collaboration stuff to feel like.
I suspect the issue is preservation of "change tracking" metadata between Docs and Word, rather than change tracking in Docs, or change tracking in Word.
I further suspect that this is a difficult thing because(in addition to probably being crufty, complex, and not as well documented as it might be), "change tracking" is partially a strictly technical problem, and partly a UI/design philosophy problem. It would be, by no means, a surprise to learn that Word and Docs have distinct approaches that simply may not be fully commensurate with one another.
Consider the analogy of programs/UIs that are basically folder hierarchy based, vs. programs/UIs that are basically metadata "tag" based. There are some basic technical challenges you would run into if you wanted to make one approach play nicely with the other(ie. parsing the metadata properly); but most of your challenges would be more about stylistic decisions concerning how best to bodge one style into the other's conventions. Should you parse the metadata and create "virtual folders" that echo a sensible folder hierarchy organization of those files? If you have a hierarchical folder tree, how best to turn that information into meaningful tags?, etc.
HTML5 advocates should really give an option for content security aka DRM, that is how real World works for now...
Even if they wanted to, how would you propose that they do that? It would be trivial enough to add a "donotallowworthlesspirateusertocopyonpainofdeath" option to the video tag; but that would only be as useful as the various browser's enforcement of it. You might get some vendors on board(though that would hardly be a given. The FOSS guys hate DRM on principle, and the corporates already have their own DRM systems, and it isn't clear that they want the competition); but you would have absolutely no way to go after the ones that refused, or the fly-by-night redistribution of copies of firefox compiled with the -ignore_DRM_flags option set.
If you observe real world DRM systems, they are all either single-party(WMDRM, Fairplay, etc.) or multi-vendor standards controlled by IP cartels bristling with patents that you must license in order to implement whatever the attached spec is(CSS, HDCP, AACS). HTML5 is in neither position. There would be absolutely no way to stop the proliferation of implementations compliant enough to receive the video; but noncompliant with respect to denying it to the user(good luck, for instance, having your site distinguish between a good-faith/best-effort DRM implementing webkit build, and a slightly tweaked build that reports exactly the same ID strings but "accidentally" lets the precious premium content sit in a snoopable memory location...
On closed platforms, where undesired binaries can simply be excluded, it'd be trivial enough; but there would be Just No Way on PCs generally.
I think that to focus on the "curated" aspect really misses(or obfuscates) a critical and ugly point.
Consider the following analogy: You want your house to be aesthetically pleasing and pleasant to use; but know fuck-all about color matching and picking furniture. So, you hire an interior decorator. They "curate" your space and emit a list of suggestions. You can then make it so, or not. On the other hand, if you go to a museum, the curator's decisions are not suggestions, and they are generally tailored to fit the desired audience as a whole, not necessarily you. You cannot add, remove, or substitute anything. Your only choice is to attend the museum or not.
In computing terms, the "interior decorator" situation is basically equivalent to the OEM providing a set of sane defaults, chosen for some mixture of security, ease of use, power, and cost. You can pick your interior decorator and, if you wish, you can deviate from their suggestions.
The "museum curator" option, on the other hand, is the iDevice/carrier lockdown situation. You can either take it or leave it; but if you take it, that's it. the OEM retains cryptographic control over "your" property forever.
The big difference is whether your "curator" is providing a list of suggestions, or a list of orders. The former, frankly, is something that OEMs(particularly the wintel guys) really ought to do a lot more and a lot better. Sane, secure, usable defaults are a good thing. The customer shouldn't have to blow the stock image to hell and rebuild from scratch just to get a desktop worth using. However, any set of defaults that doesn't include a "screw this, I'll do it myself and take the consequences" button, somewhere, that allows you to reject advice and do your own thing is ultimately invidious and will inevitably be used as a tool of rent-seeking(as in consoles, where the OEM extracts a tithe for the privilege of being allowed to sell programs that run on the hardware, or as in the App Store) and likely censorship and all sorts of other fun stuff.
It's a "managed freedom institution".
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
I think that it's just an idiom. Or, possibly, a phrase that was, at one time, correct under current usage rules, and has outlasted that set of usage rules. If something "has a ways to go" this means that it is a significant distance from where it needs to be. Occasionally, it contains a polite, if slightly pointed, suggestion that it may never get there.
I honestly don't understand how an anecdote about a seriously fucked server setup is relevant in the slightest to the pros or cons of "HTML web apps" or their development.
With HTML, whether the shiniest of web 2.0 or the seriously old-school stuff, there is clear separation between the client(where "standards" such as they are, matter) and the server, which can do absolutely whatever it likes, so long as it responds correctly to a few HTTP messages.
If you want to deliver a webapp, the development of your client component is, indeed, somewhat constrained by the fact that "web standards" are more evolved than designed, and are somewhat inconsistently implemented. If you want to discuss the cons of web-apps, horror stories in this vein are the anecdote to use. If you want to discuss the pros, heroic tales of multiplatform, install-free deployment are to be used.
On the server side, though, the vices and virtues of web standards(aside from seriously uncontroversial stuff like TCP/IP and HTTP GET) are basically irrelevant. It's your server. You can do whatever you want to deliver HTML, CSS, and javascript, and interpret responses from your clients. Totally in-house stack? If you feel like it. Modestly customized OSS job? Sure. Some single-vendor enterprise development solution? If that is how you roll. The fact that somebody's web-dev fucked up and then disappeared just seems completely irrelevant(can you think of any type of development, application or otherwise, where "the developer fucked up, then disappeared, and we had to call somebody else in to do a mixture of archeology and pacification" has ever been a good thing?)