Apple's plan B

Former Apple evangelist Matt Drance has a new blog, Apple Outsider. His first post asks why Apple, so controlling over its own ecosystem, still promotes HTML5. After all, it's something it can't control. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" isn't Apple's style, so perhaps it's just hedging bets:

If the Cocoa Touch app empire crumbles before a next-generation replacement is ready, the next best thing is an open standard. The alternative is that someone else's proprietary technology wins–either on Apple's platform, or worse, on another hardware platform entirely. An open web is a safe, neutral fallback.

The open web being both Apple's enemy and its plan B seems both reassuring and scary. It knows the web might defeat native apps — but also that the browser is the gateway to it. Standards are just there. The ones that win are the ones that ship.

Cocoa, Flash, and Safari [Apple Outsider via Daring Fireball]