The computing world is always very unpredictable. That must be why there is a small number of people who make large amounts of money from it: they are in the right (unpredictable) place, at the right (unpredictable) time. Who would have ever guessed that Javascript, a simple scripting language initially thought as a simple means to make web pages "cooler", would become... drum roll... the world's new CPU?

I doubt anybody expected it. Even after seeing AJAX (which was ironically started by Microsoft...), very few would have bet that Javascript would become quite so important. Javascript is the only really widespread, multiplatform solution the modern IT world has seen. And yet, it made it. Google Documents is an office suite which runs in your browser -- and it's not even the best one. And that's only the beginning: the world is absolutely full of software -- and I am talking about full blown software -- which will run for you wherever you are.

It's not always true that the neatest, most advanced technology ends up winning most of the market share. There are other reasons which get in the way. Sometimes, the less advanced solutions end up winning -- and evolve in order to become more solid and established. An example of this is Javascript/AJAX, which has conquered most of the web-based client programming -- despite the fact that there were competing technologies which could (and maybe should) have easily won, purely based on technical merits. How did that happen?