Although I'm not involved with enterprise software, I am worried by the direction Firefox and Chrome are taking: in addition to being a platform for deploying applications, the web is the most important way for readers and writers to share text on the internet, and I worry that rapidly improving the web's ability to deploy applications will make it less suitable for reading and writing. For example, if the web would have been used only for reading and writing, browsers would probably be a lot more stable than they actually are (since an application-delivery platform is a more complicated and consequently less stable thing than a text-delivery platform). And browsers probably wouldn't require half a gig of RAM like Firefox 5 does.

Note that it is not worth a writer's time to use an alternative to the web to deliver text over the net until a sufficiently large fraction of his potential audience is set up to use the alternative. Similarly, a reader cannot use the alternative to download or read a particular text unless a writer (well, owner of the text's copyright, to be more exact) chooses to publish in that alternative. And the existence of the web makes it hard for any such alternative to gain traction. So, readers and writers are stuck with the web for a number of years, until some alternative reaches critical mass.

So when I read about how the pursuit of the HTML 5 vision is causing pain for enterprise users, my first reaction is not to conclude that enterprise users are holding back the web, but rather to see the enterprise as a potential ally in the important project of preventing the HTML 5 program or the enhanced-web-app program from making reading and writing online a lot more difficult than it needs to be.