First of all, AMDs foundry probably is considered to have inherited the licence so I dont know if Intels claims really hold up.
IP license agreements very frequently written so as not to be transferable without the permission of the owner of the licensed IP. Its not AMD's foundry, its a separate company which AMD formed with ATIC (the latter being, at least according to most reports I've seen, the majority interest holder) and attempted to transfer some rights under the license (while also retaining them in AMD, as I understand it.) The license might allow that, it might not, but its not the case of a successor in interest like you would have if the new company was a separate firm that had bought AMD outright, and even with those kind of situations ISTR seeing cases where the terms of a license agreement caused it to be terminated (with licensed merchandise based on TV and movie franchises) by that kind of transfer.
Its been a long time since the chip architecture and schematic of AMDs chips have been directly based on Intels, if they ever have been. The only thing they share is the instruction set. Instruction sets are basically a language or communication protocol and these should not be copyrightable, just as someone could not copyright HTML, IM protocols or English. Only an implementation of software of these can be copyrighted not the language itself.
I'm pretty sure the main issue with the license are patents on elements of the technology not copyright on the schematics and instruction set.
If AMD wins, they might be more likely to grant Nvidia the x86 license they've been seeking for so long. If Intel wins, AMD is effectively hamstrung, and they may very well have to grant Nvidia (and others) an x86 license to stave off antitrust regulators.
Neither company's preferred, winning position is that the cross-licensing agreement is terminated. Both, of course, are accusing the other of breach (though AMD's "by claiming that we breached the agreement, you breached the agreement" line is pretty...well, I'd be surprised if the agreement actually justified that, especially given that Intel didn't publicly announce the claim of a breach, AMD did in their SEC filing, which is where the news came from.)
Intel most likely wants AMD to give concessions in return for a modification to the agreement that would allow the spin-off, and AMD wants to be allowed to spin-off without consequence. If there is any other result, neither Intel nor AMD has really "won".
My preference would be MIPS or SPARC inspired, but thats just me, either way its time to move on/up.
Given the fact that current Windows (Server, but its a start) already supports it, I suspect if x86_64 goes away, Itanium would have a leg up on being the 64-bit mass market chip of the near future, if Intel put the effort into delivering suitable versions for the consumer market.
IANAL, but wouldn't it look bad in court if after AMD went through all the trouble to spin off the whateverfoundry with nary a peep from intel?
Well, if that was the case, it might. Of course, Intel says they made several attempts to discuss the issue with AMD when they became aware of AMD's plan for the spin off, and AMD refused to discuss the issue, and once the spin-off was done (which is, according to Intel's claim, when the breach occurred), Intel sent notice that it was viewing AMD's action as a breach and providing the required notice that if the breach wasn't cured within 60 days, Intel would terminate the cross-licensing agreement.
Surprisingly enough, AMD's story paints AMD as perfectly in the right, and Intel as completely wrong, and Intel's does the same for AMD. The facts could be anywhere from one pole to the other, but since we don't know what communication actually occurred, before or after the spin-off, and we don't know what the actual licensing agreement says, we really don't know who is right and who is wrong.
The tiny problem with Dubai is its money isn't made in oil, but in banking and tourism.
Not that Dubai, except by analogy, is really relevant to AMD, since ATIC, AMD's partner in the Globalfoundries joint venture, is controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi, not Dubai. Two different emirates in the UAE.
If I'm not mistaken, the folks who bought the foundry from AMD are the same folks who are building in Dubai.
The other partner in the joint venture, besides AMD, is the Advanced Technology Investments Company (ATIC), which is controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi is one of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai is a different one of the United Arab Emirates. The "folks who are building in Dubai" is kind of a murky label, but the high-profile developments in Dubai that get lots of attention seem to be each backed largely by one of Emaar Properties or Nakheel Properties, both which are "private" developers that are joined at the hip to the Dubai government; as far as I know, none of the high profile developments in Dubai are backed by ATIC, or other enterprises controlled by the Abu Dhabi government (who you would expect would be more interested in promoting developments in Abu Dhabi than in Dubai.)
The license is confidential, so what we know is that Intel claims AMD has breached the license, and AMD claims they haven't. Since we have two interested parties each making claims that both reflect their own natural interest, and don't have the essential facts (like, the contents of the agreement) against which to evaluated those self-interested claims, we really can't say much about whether or not the license has been breached.
Intel has no true competition in the x86 market other then AMD.
That's rather the point of a patent: no patent holder has competition in the market for things directly within the coverage of the patent. Patents are intended as government granted monopolies. That's the whole point. Intel has a monopoly there whether or not they have licensed other people to use the technology on which they have a monopoly.
But "x86" isn't the kind of market anti-trust analysis would usually focus on. Desktop PC CPUs might be, but without x86-64s, which are a big chunk of the current mainstream market there, I'm not sure that Intel would have a monopoly there. Sure, they've got Itanium and their (currently low-end) 32-bit x86 offerings, and AMD has its low-end non-x86 offerings. Taking out x86-64 would be disruptive, and AMD would almost certainly lose marketshare from it, but its not at all clear that Intel would win, or even have as dominant a position as it has now where, depending on exactly where you draw the line, you arguably have Intel and Intel-licensed products dominating the entire market.
I'm sure AMD's raft of lawyers is as specifically aware of the definitions that matter in this specific instance as are Intel's raft of lawyers. If there is a specific definition to reduce ambiguity, then they both have copies.
Right. My point was simply that common use has no bearing. No one not in AMD or Intel knows what is in the cross-licensing agreement, and so no one knows whether this is a clear violation, clearly not a violation, or in some murky space in between. And there are all kinds of reasons why it might be either, and why the companies might posture exactly the way they are now no matter what the reality is. Until the text of the agreement is known, there is no real intelligent debate to be had on whether or not it is a violation.
If only an Itanium could run a typical desktop binary compiled for IA64 as fast as an x86_64 box that costs half as much.
If x86_64 goes away because the cross-licensing agreement is killed, that comparison won't be relevant. What will be relevant is Itanium's performance on x86 (not IA64) apps vs. other competitors performance on x86 apps, for the legacy, and performance on native (IA64) apps vs. the native performance of remaining competing processors (not x86_64, which won't be an option) at the same price, and Itanium is likely to have an initial advantage simply because of Windows (since Server is currently maintained on Itanium, its probably, of the 64-bit chips that would be left without x86_64, the one which would see native versions of the rest of the Windows line first.)
Back in the day, Microsoft had ports of NT for Alpha, PPC, and MIPS.
And Windows Server still supports Itanium.
Alpha and MIPS are both dead and gone, while SPARC and PPC have corporate overlords who seem to have no interest in catering to the consumer market.
Meanwhile, Itanium is still actively developed, and has a corporate overlord that had announced plans to move it to the consumer market, before abandoning those in the face of the popularity of x86_64 which it cross-licensed from AMD, reserving Itanium for the enterprise server/HPC market.
Nothing that you say contradicts what I stated, so I'd like to understand where your disagreement is. As I said, this would be very much like mutually assured destruction, but not precisely symmetrical, as AMD would be hurt more than Intel.
It would force both AMD and Intel to pull their chips temporarily.
Most of their CPUs, and even moreso most of those in the main consumer PC market, certainly.
The only thing Intel could sell is the Atom (32 bit only), and the original version of the Core (again, 32 bit only).
And Itanium.
Likewise AMD would still have the Geode and other chips to sell, but their desktop/server line would have to stop.
While Intel would still have a desktop/server line to sell, one that is losing ground to x86-64 more than its other competition.
MS would probably continue okay (I hear Win7 runs okay on the Atom and old Core processors), but it would mean that we'd be back at 32bit limits for things like memory.
Windows Server already supports Itanium, so if x86-64 was cleared out of the way and Intel returned to its original hope of moving Itanium into consumer products, it probably wouldn't take much for Microsoft to have its consumer-focussed Windows products supported on Itanium, too.
The groups that would be hurt the most (beyond AMD and Intel)? Computer retailers like Dell and Apple (whose products would have to be redesigned)
OTOH, those computer manufacturers that currently produce Itanium systems, while they would lose any x86-64 systems they have, would suddenly face a less crowded market.
The problem is with the companies, who find it to be highly lucrative to develop a market in Dallas, or Little Rock, but neglect the backwaters. Government SHOULD guide development, but it doesn't.
I certainly agree with you that the source of the disparity is in government policy; but we can't have government "guiding development" in the US, because that would be "socialism".
was chosen for that service because it makes ALL the American English phonetic distinctions (vs. for example an east-coast accent which merges "l" and "r" making Kennedys sound like they're saying Fidel heads "Cuber")
Merging "l" and "r" is kind of tangential to that, since the Carribean nation at issue isn't called "Cubal", either.
but isn't that generally what a company that is in majority controlled by another company called?
What something is generally called is often entirely irrelevant to the definitions of terms in a particular contract. (There are a number of "general" definitions of "subsidiary", and they conflict: one is a firm wholly owned or controlled by another, another is one in which the parent has majority control, or in which an entities which are themselves subsidiaries of the parent collectively have majority control. Because of conflicts and ambiguities in general usage, terms that are important in contracts are usually defined precisely in the contract.)
If Intel becomes the exclusive provider of x86 chips, they'll be smacked by the government with anti-trust litigation (Note: I did not say WHICH government, my fellow silly Americans).
Whether or not they are the sole manufacturer, since any manufacturer depends on a license from Intel, they are still a monopoly insofar as x86 chips are a valid market for anti-trust analysis; and, more relevantly, are arguably a monopoly, therefore, where desktop and traditional laptop PC CPUs are concerned, which is somewhat more likely to be an appropriate market. OTOH, in most jurisdictions, as I understand it, (and certainly this is the case in the US) just having a de facto monopoly isn't enough for anti-trust litigation, you have to leverage the market improperly. Enforcing an existing agreement that is, in itself, not an unfair leveraging of the market probably won't usually qualify, so just ending the AMD agreement because of a breach by AMD (if that has actually occurred) would probably not be a problem.
So, surely this is a case of mutually assured destruction for both isn't?
Something like that, but not perfectly symmetrically. While x86_64 is well-enough established that it would be inconvenient for Intel to have to go back to x86 and build a new, non-derivative extension with similar capabilities, it would be less of a problem for them than AMD losing the rights to use x86-anything.
Given that Intel and AMD don't have serious competition for desktop PCs right now, its possible that the a result that hurts Intel a lot but AMD more in the short term could benefit Intel in the long term, though really the intent here is almost certainly to get concessions from AMD on the basis that Intel may be able to prevail in court, and AMD stands to lose more if the agreement is terminated; it is extremely unlikely that Intel's goal is to terminate the agreement.
People who? Do you really think that 99% of the computer users even know what x86 means?
No, but most users don't need to. Microsoft does, and Microsoft has no reason to want any one other firm to be indispensable to PC vendors the way Microsoft is. So, if the AMD cross-licensing agreement goes away and there isn't serious competition for Intel in the x86 world, I'd expect Microsoft to start supporting alternatives.
That's when the Several States found out, violently, that they couldn't leave the federation if they disagreed with its politics or the economic central planning that moved the money to New York and kept what's now "flyover country" in third-world status.
"Flyover country" isn't, and hasn't been, in third-world status, and isn't the part of the country that tried to secede, anyway. And the principal policy that the Confederate States (their name for themselves, as opposed to the made-up poppycock label you've introduced) objected to was the anticipated abolition of slavery (an abolition which, ironically, was accelerated by the South's failed attempt at secession to avoid it.)
Freeing slaves was never the target - it could have been done a LOT cheaper by buying them, as it was in the rest of the world - and the Emancipation Proclamation was tacked on near the end as a tactical move, though "freeing slaves" had been used as pro-war propaganda - like the "going after the WMD" stories about Iraq
In the real world, unlike the fantasy you are describing, Lincoln won the Presidency largely by -- despite being against slavery -- being against any effort to "free the slaves" that would jeopardize the stability of the Union. Freeing the slaves was never claimed as a goal of the war by the Union, which makes sense when you consider that the Union included slave states, who were hardly interested in a war to "free the slaves".
There was never any secret that the North's sole reason for war was that South launched a armed attempt at secession and the North opposed both the goal and the means. "Freeing the slaves" wasn't a cover for the real motivation, and it would have been a poor one since it would have had less support than the real motivation.
Did Europe have internet twenty years before the United States did?
Well, France had a widespread online service with interactive features, email, etc., long before the United States had similar penetration of similar technology, much less on a shared network, though it wasn't "the internet".
Voice tech has an achilles heel: It's called accents. Most voice software works great for english-speaking people in the midwestern United States.
If that's true of this software developed by IBM's Indian research arm and pilot tested in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, then I suspect it will also handle a lot of other English-speaking people.
But if you have an accent
As if English-speaking people from the midwestern United States don't.
People, the web is fine for multimedia and information presentation, but why is there this constant push to integrate everything into the web?
Because browsers, despite the incompatibilities, are a lot more ubiquitous and differ a lot less than native operating systems, and because most devices that you are interested in reaching already have one installed. Therefore, its a lot easier to build an app that relies on the user having one of a handful of common browser profiles and expect the user to be able to reach it over the internet and interact with it than it is to do so any other way and reach the same size audience.
This is not the direction we want to go right now.
It may not be the direction you want to go, but it clearly is the direction the rest of the market has collectively decided to go, with or without your blessing.
A lightweight browser that can present information in a variety of devices is where the web needs to stay
It can't "stay" there because it hasn't been there for years. Sorry.
HTML, XML, CSS, and maybe some javascript is all the farther anyone needs to go.
Clearly, other people have different perspectives on their needs than you do.
We need to work on making this information as available and accessible as possible
If that's what you feel you need to work on, then work on it, and convince people that what you've developed is a better choice than what everyone else is developing.
HTML as a standard has been so bastardized over the years that the kind of incompatibilities that the article discusses exist not only across different browsers but also between browser versions.
Maybe it's time to start over. Flash and Java applets seem like a good place to start.
Neither Flash not Java or open standards, nor do either of them really serve the basic role of HTML. If you need an open standard for the purpose that HTML is designed to serve that isn't HTML, what might be good is to reverse the direction HTML took from its early forms and drop the semantic markup and make an XML-based, unpaged-display-oriented physical markup language -- essentially the unpaged equivalent of XSL-FO -- and use whatever XML you want for semantic markup with XSLT to convert to the new display language.
But I really think that HTML is mostly good enough for what it does, and is entrenched enough that its not likely going to be replaced in its role anytime soon.
It's surprising how many senior execs equate the quality of one's written language output with intelligence or the ability to do.
If communicating in writing is part of your job, the quality of "written language output" (or, more conventionally, "writing") isn't just something that people falsely equate with the "ability to do", it is a core job proficiency. And there are very few tech jobs where communication isn't an important part of the job, and more often than not writing is an important part of that communication.
But the kids rocking 3.9's and 4.0's, that "top five percent" in grades? They're clueless. Absorb the book material, spit it back out on exams, forget it after. It's all rote, there's no intuition and no skill.
That's only possible at an institution that has really poor standards, and, anywhere it is possible, an equal or greater proportion of the students with lower GPA's will also have no substantive skill, they just will also lack the skill of absorbing book material and spitting it back on exams.
That's not to say you won't see people that are incredibly talented and skilled that still end up with lower GPAs than people that have lesser talents and skills, and its not even to say that sometime the former type of people won't end up being better in the workforce. Which is, of course, why few employers look only at GPA.
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IP license agreements very frequently written so as not to be transferable without the permission of the owner of the licensed IP. Its not AMD's foundry, its a separate company which AMD formed with ATIC (the latter being, at least according to most reports I've seen, the majority interest holder) and attempted to transfer some rights under the license (while also retaining them in AMD, as I understand it.) The license might allow that, it might not, but its not the case of a successor in interest like you would have if the new company was a separate firm that had bought AMD outright, and even with those kind of situations ISTR seeing cases where the terms of a license agreement caused it to be terminated (with licensed merchandise based on TV and movie franchises) by that kind of transfer.
I'm pretty sure the main issue with the license are patents on elements of the technology not copyright on the schematics and instruction set.
Neither company's preferred, winning position is that the cross-licensing agreement is terminated. Both, of course, are accusing the other of breach (though AMD's "by claiming that we breached the agreement, you breached the agreement" line is pretty...well, I'd be surprised if the agreement actually justified that, especially given that Intel didn't publicly announce the claim of a breach, AMD did in their SEC filing, which is where the news came from.)
Intel most likely wants AMD to give concessions in return for a modification to the agreement that would allow the spin-off, and AMD wants to be allowed to spin-off without consequence. If there is any other result, neither Intel nor AMD has really "won".
Given the fact that current Windows (Server, but its a start) already supports it, I suspect if x86_64 goes away, Itanium would have a leg up on being the 64-bit mass market chip of the near future, if Intel put the effort into delivering suitable versions for the consumer market.
Well, if that was the case, it might. Of course, Intel says they made several attempts to discuss the issue with AMD when they became aware of AMD's plan for the spin off, and AMD refused to discuss the issue, and once the spin-off was done (which is, according to Intel's claim, when the breach occurred), Intel sent notice that it was viewing AMD's action as a breach and providing the required notice that if the breach wasn't cured within 60 days, Intel would terminate the cross-licensing agreement.
Surprisingly enough, AMD's story paints AMD as perfectly in the right, and Intel as completely wrong, and Intel's does the same for AMD. The facts could be anywhere from one pole to the other, but since we don't know what communication actually occurred, before or after the spin-off, and we don't know what the actual licensing agreement says, we really don't know who is right and who is wrong.
Not that Dubai, except by analogy, is really relevant to AMD, since ATIC, AMD's partner in the Globalfoundries joint venture, is controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi, not Dubai. Two different emirates in the UAE.
The other partner in the joint venture, besides AMD, is the Advanced Technology Investments Company (ATIC), which is controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi is one of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai is a different one of the United Arab Emirates. The "folks who are building in Dubai" is kind of a murky label, but the high-profile developments in Dubai that get lots of attention seem to be each backed largely by one of Emaar Properties or Nakheel Properties, both which are "private" developers that are joined at the hip to the Dubai government; as far as I know, none of the high profile developments in Dubai are backed by ATIC, or other enterprises controlled by the Abu Dhabi government (who you would expect would be more interested in promoting developments in Abu Dhabi than in Dubai.)
The license is confidential, so what we know is that Intel claims AMD has breached the license, and AMD claims they haven't. Since we have two interested parties each making claims that both reflect their own natural interest, and don't have the essential facts (like, the contents of the agreement) against which to evaluated those self-interested claims, we really can't say much about whether or not the license has been breached.
That's rather the point of a patent: no patent holder has competition in the market for things directly within the coverage of the patent. Patents are intended as government granted monopolies. That's the whole point. Intel has a monopoly there whether or not they have licensed other people to use the technology on which they have a monopoly.
But "x86" isn't the kind of market anti-trust analysis would usually focus on. Desktop PC CPUs might be, but without x86-64s, which are a big chunk of the current mainstream market there, I'm not sure that Intel would have a monopoly there. Sure, they've got Itanium and their (currently low-end) 32-bit x86 offerings, and AMD has its low-end non-x86 offerings. Taking out x86-64 would be disruptive, and AMD would almost certainly lose marketshare from it, but its not at all clear that Intel would win, or even have as dominant a position as it has now where, depending on exactly where you draw the line, you arguably have Intel and Intel-licensed products dominating the entire market.
Right. My point was simply that common use has no bearing. No one not in AMD or Intel knows what is in the cross-licensing agreement, and so no one knows whether this is a clear violation, clearly not a violation, or in some murky space in between. And there are all kinds of reasons why it might be either, and why the companies might posture exactly the way they are now no matter what the reality is. Until the text of the agreement is known, there is no real intelligent debate to be had on whether or not it is a violation.
If x86_64 goes away because the cross-licensing agreement is killed, that comparison won't be relevant. What will be relevant is Itanium's performance on x86 (not IA64) apps vs. other competitors performance on x86 apps, for the legacy, and performance on native (IA64) apps vs. the native performance of remaining competing processors (not x86_64, which won't be an option) at the same price, and Itanium is likely to have an initial advantage simply because of Windows (since Server is currently maintained on Itanium, its probably, of the 64-bit chips that would be left without x86_64, the one which would see native versions of the rest of the Windows line first.)
And Windows Server still supports Itanium.
Meanwhile, Itanium is still actively developed, and has a corporate overlord that had announced plans to move it to the consumer market, before abandoning those in the face of the popularity of x86_64 which it cross-licensed from AMD, reserving Itanium for the enterprise server/HPC market.
Nothing that you say contradicts what I stated, so I'd like to understand where your disagreement is. As I said, this would be very much like mutually assured destruction, but not precisely symmetrical, as AMD would be hurt more than Intel.
Most of their CPUs, and even moreso most of those in the main consumer PC market, certainly.
And Itanium.
While Intel would still have a desktop/server line to sell, one that is losing ground to x86-64 more than its other competition.
Windows Server already supports Itanium, so if x86-64 was cleared out of the way and Intel returned to its original hope of moving Itanium into consumer products, it probably wouldn't take much for Microsoft to have its consumer-focussed Windows products supported on Itanium, too.
OTOH, those computer manufacturers that currently produce Itanium systems, while they would lose any x86-64 systems they have, would suddenly face a less crowded market.
I certainly agree with you that the source of the disparity is in government policy; but we can't have government "guiding development" in the US, because that would be "socialism".
Merging "l" and "r" is kind of tangential to that, since the Carribean nation at issue isn't called "Cubal", either.
What something is generally called is often entirely irrelevant to the definitions of terms in a particular contract. (There are a number of "general" definitions of "subsidiary", and they conflict: one is a firm wholly owned or controlled by another, another is one in which the parent has majority control, or in which an entities which are themselves subsidiaries of the parent collectively have majority control. Because of conflicts and ambiguities in general usage, terms that are important in contracts are usually defined precisely in the contract.)
Whether or not they are the sole manufacturer, since any manufacturer depends on a license from Intel, they are still a monopoly insofar as x86 chips are a valid market for anti-trust analysis; and, more relevantly, are arguably a monopoly, therefore, where desktop and traditional laptop PC CPUs are concerned, which is somewhat more likely to be an appropriate market. OTOH, in most jurisdictions, as I understand it, (and certainly this is the case in the US) just having a de facto monopoly isn't enough for anti-trust litigation, you have to leverage the market improperly. Enforcing an existing agreement that is, in itself, not an unfair leveraging of the market probably won't usually qualify, so just ending the AMD agreement because of a breach by AMD (if that has actually occurred) would probably not be a problem.
Something like that, but not perfectly symmetrically. While x86_64 is well-enough established that it would be inconvenient for Intel to have to go back to x86 and build a new, non-derivative extension with similar capabilities, it would be less of a problem for them than AMD losing the rights to use x86-anything.
Given that Intel and AMD don't have serious competition for desktop PCs right now, its possible that the a result that hurts Intel a lot but AMD more in the short term could benefit Intel in the long term, though really the intent here is almost certainly to get concessions from AMD on the basis that Intel may be able to prevail in court, and AMD stands to lose more if the agreement is terminated; it is extremely unlikely that Intel's goal is to terminate the agreement.
No, but most users don't need to. Microsoft does, and Microsoft has no reason to want any one other firm to be indispensable to PC vendors the way Microsoft is. So, if the AMD cross-licensing agreement goes away and there isn't serious competition for Intel in the x86 world, I'd expect Microsoft to start supporting alternatives.
"Flyover country" isn't, and hasn't been, in third-world status, and isn't the part of the country that tried to secede, anyway. And the principal policy that the Confederate States (their name for themselves, as opposed to the made-up poppycock label you've introduced) objected to was the anticipated abolition of slavery (an abolition which, ironically, was accelerated by the South's failed attempt at secession to avoid it.)
In the real world, unlike the fantasy you are describing, Lincoln won the Presidency largely by -- despite being against slavery -- being against any effort to "free the slaves" that would jeopardize the stability of the Union. Freeing the slaves was never claimed as a goal of the war by the Union, which makes sense when you consider that the Union included slave states, who were hardly interested in a war to "free the slaves".
There was never any secret that the North's sole reason for war was that South launched a armed attempt at secession and the North opposed both the goal and the means. "Freeing the slaves" wasn't a cover for the real motivation, and it would have been a poor one since it would have had less support than the real motivation.
Well, France had a widespread online service with interactive features, email, etc., long before the United States had similar penetration of similar technology, much less on a shared network, though it wasn't "the internet".
If that's true of this software developed by IBM's Indian research arm and pilot tested in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, then I suspect it will also handle a lot of other English-speaking people.
As if English-speaking people from the midwestern United States don't.
Because browsers, despite the incompatibilities, are a lot more ubiquitous and differ a lot less than native operating systems, and because most devices that you are interested in reaching already have one installed. Therefore, its a lot easier to build an app that relies on the user having one of a handful of common browser profiles and expect the user to be able to reach it over the internet and interact with it than it is to do so any other way and reach the same size audience.
It may not be the direction you want to go, but it clearly is the direction the rest of the market has collectively decided to go, with or without your blessing.
It can't "stay" there because it hasn't been there for years. Sorry.
Clearly, other people have different perspectives on their needs than you do.
If that's what you feel you need to work on, then work on it, and convince people that what you've developed is a better choice than what everyone else is developing.
Neither Flash not Java or open standards, nor do either of them really serve the basic role of HTML. If you need an open standard for the purpose that HTML is designed to serve that isn't HTML, what might be good is to reverse the direction HTML took from its early forms and drop the semantic markup and make an XML-based, unpaged-display-oriented physical markup language -- essentially the unpaged equivalent of XSL-FO -- and use whatever XML you want for semantic markup with XSLT to convert to the new display language.
But I really think that HTML is mostly good enough for what it does, and is entrenched enough that its not likely going to be replaced in its role anytime soon.
If communicating in writing is part of your job, the quality of "written language output" (or, more conventionally, "writing") isn't just something that people falsely equate with the "ability to do", it is a core job proficiency. And there are very few tech jobs where communication isn't an important part of the job, and more often than not writing is an important part of that communication.
That's only possible at an institution that has really poor standards, and, anywhere it is possible, an equal or greater proportion of the students with lower GPA's will also have no substantive skill, they just will also lack the skill of absorbing book material and spitting it back on exams.
That's not to say you won't see people that are incredibly talented and skilled that still end up with lower GPAs than people that have lesser talents and skills, and its not even to say that sometime the former type of people won't end up being better in the workforce. Which is, of course, why few employers look only at GPA.