Careful there!
"more and more enterprises are setting up internal app stores"
Has crApple sought royalty payments or sued any of them yet?
Consumer smartphone apps may get all the press, not to mention $15bn in market size by 2013, but enterprise smartphone apps may well prove to be the bigger market. This may be particularly true of HTML5 apps, which have been all the rage at Facebook, the Financial Times, and other consumer-facing app developers. The reason? …
If employee "happiness" could be better if enterprise tools didn't settle for "good enough". While development costs would certainly increase, could it also lower other extremely high priced line items like employee turnover & training costs? I know that an eccentric in-house application is a major source of "back burner" frustration at some places I've worked.
"It's easy to see why. Enterprise IT used to be able to dictate the types of devices it would support on its networks or for its services. No more. Employees have run amok with their preferred consumer mobile devices, and enterprise IT is sprinting to keep up."
In the Enterprises I've worked in, employees running amok with their preferred devices and expecting to connect them to the corporate systems in any way, shape or form would be sadly disappointed. The do and always will dictate what is allowed onto their networks - small things like compliance, audit, and regulations kind of dictates that.
And by Enterprise the most typical definition for it is simply "big". The company I work for has 300+K employees and there is crap everywhere. Wifi is locked down, but Ethernet is not and personal use mobile devices for mail is encouraged.
We're not ITAR, HIPAA, or Securities/Financial - and I work with companies like you're talking about. Just saying, there are all sorts of different flavors of Enterprise out there and, in my experience, the level of lockdown is usually more cultural than it is legal.
HTML5 is just the bones around which JavaScript applications are built; and I think JavaScript is the real story here.
JavaScript's ubiquitous deployment (mobile, desktop, server) and standards base will allow it to suck in new features from other laguages over time. Witness Intel's River Trail project for an example of how this can happen ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/17/intel_parallel_javascript/ ), or perhaps E4X.
The outrageously broad deployment of JavaScript, and focus on performance, means that JavaScript (and HTML5) performance/behaviour is only going to get better over time.
I'm not suggesting that JavaScript is the /best/ language, but I do think it's going to be with us for a very long time into the future. Get used to it.