Delivering Bing as an HTML5 app offers several advantages, says Santanu Basu, Microsoft's product manager of Bing for Mobile, in a .

"Rather than tightly binding functions into a mobile client, we want to embrace the drive towards exposing our functions via an HTML5 experience. In order for search to advance, engines need to be able to call functions that are currently 'hiding' in apps," he wrote. "Using HTML5, our goal is to build a mobile experience that leverages the unique capabilities of the different platforms including camera support and voice search, while making the functions the apps can provide consistent across the platforms and -- in the future -- callable by engines to help people get from searching to doing."

This praise for HTML5 on mobile platforms may also be telling. Microsoft is seemingly pushing out its own development platforms in favor of the next revision of HTML, which supports rich multimedia and experiences. Windows developers, be they in the enterprise or ISVs, have invested years in effort and many training dollars in Microsoft platforms, from Win32 and COM to .Net, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation.

With the introduction of Windows 8, Microsoft caused much consternation among developers by using HTML5 and JavaScript as the basis for its new Metro applications. Although Microsoft still plans that at least the next version of Windows and Windows Phone will support applications built on its own technologies, many pundits say the writing is on the wall.

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