Another great article from Joel on Software on the death of GMail. Basically he looks at the current state of webapps, and how things are looking a bit like they were with the "write once, run anywhere" portable C programming language and the even more run-anywhere-y Java with javascript and CSS. The suckage of developing for the 4+ major browsers for webapps is looking a lot like having to develop your app for the 80286, 80386, powerPC and RISC chipsets... (sounds a bit like my own rant about the various states of support that IE has :)

Best quote from it:

You could six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.