Google's Web App announcement

Yeah, I imagine the idea that someone might actually want access to something in the real world didn't occur to Chrome's management at all :(

Actually I was one of the main people pushing for access to the local filesystem in chrome apps and got the API added. There were people in product management that explicitly were opposed to this because it's not the direction they wanted to go with ChromeOS. It allows too much offline autonomy. I thought I had won the war when we got is pushed through and Google would have to support the API forever, but I guess they showed me.

Generally speaking, Google engineers are amazing people who do amazing work, but their management sometimes shuts down good ideas if it doesn't line up with the company's product vision. (Which to be fair is their job.) We only get upset and angry when we forget that we developers aren't their stakeholders and they do something not in our best interest.