If you look at the iPhone and Mac, there are 2 main API’s on both:

- low-end apps are open HTML5
- high-end apps are proprietary Cocoa

Compare to Windows, which also has 2 main API’s:

- low-end apps are proprietary IE6
- high-end apps are proprietary Win32

And in Google Chrome OS, you have only 1:

- low-end apps are done in open HTML5
- high-end apps are not supported

So Chrome OS enables the user who only requires low-end apps to jettison the complexity that comes with desktop apps and embrace a new network-centric computing model. But it does not enable someone who is editing a motion picture to get any work done at all. It doesn’t help the audio producer at all. You can’t run a typical Web development toolchain on it, the Unix tools are not there.

Cocoa supports unlimited real-time 32-bit/192kHz audio streams, while in HTML5 we are still celebrating the new audio tag that lets us play 1 stereo 16-bit/44kHz audio stream without asking another app to do it. So there is quite a ways to go before we could port the typical Cocoa audio production app to HTML5.

But there are a lot of low-end apps like MS Office that have been done in the high-end API in the past, but can now move to the HTML5 API. Google just called an HTML5 MS Office “a killer app for Chrome OS.” However, MS Office online is not currently done in HTML5. Probably 90% of Win32 can move to HTML5, which would make the apps run everywhere, not just on Windows.