I hope that Google does build on WebM with a second generation and more. Competition in the marketplace is a good thing and leads to innovation

You simply are proving my point that Google is in a position to assert itself in the market. Google is on its way to becoming like Microsoft from the 90's and Apple of the 2000's. They are asserting their influence in sometimes anti-competitive manners while claiming that they "do no evil." They are in business to make money, plain and simple. They will operate in such a manner as be as efficient as possible in an effort to make more money for their shareholders. They are not doing this for the sake of open source or open standards. They are doing it for the sake of making more money, that comes through selling advertising, or by giving away operating systems to device makers that ostensibly provide additional screens for Google to advertise on.

FYI... I don't have a problem with any of this. I just wish they would be honest about it.

Does anybody really think that there won't be a new next-generation video codec to supersede both h.264 and WebM by the time the royalty free licenses expire in 2014? The reality of the situation is that Google is continuing to assert their strong position in the marketplace to potentially negatively affect the consumer, and all of their existing devices, to potentially positively affect their bottom line and that of their shareholders. To all of those who believe that Google is a "good" company, please remember that they are a publicly traded company that is really only beholden to benefit of their shareholders.

Open Source != (Open) Standard

Whether a tool is open source or not doesn't make it a standard, open or otherwise. What makes something a standard is when a group of people, companies, etc... (IEEE, ISO, ITU,etc...) get together propose and ratify a standard. In the case of h.264 the MPEG-LA and its members contributed their technologies and processes to the pool to build many of the wonderful products we like today. The only way that all of these different products by different manufacturers work is if they all support the standard. All of these companies built these technologies to make money.

What Google did with WebM was buy a company and provide one of their newly purchased products as open-source. This product may, or may not, come under scrutiny for various IP issues. Many have stated in the past that a number of WebM's algorithms are very similar to those of h.264 and its "freeness" may come in to question.

Googles actions today are not for you or for me. They are for the positive gain of Google as well as the negative impact on all of Google's competitors. This would not be a bad thing if this did not take into account the fact that millions, if not billions, of people already own products that make use of h.264 and therefore negatively affects consumers if they are forced to buy new products.

In the long run, will it matter? Won't there be something new by 2014 anyways? I doubt the MPEG-LA members are resting on their laurels and not working on h.265 or MPEG-5 or whatever is next anyways.

I wish people would wake up and stop believing the "don't be evil" mantra when Google is as bad as Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and/or Oracle.

Is it just me, or does this laptop remind anyone else of the short-lived Apple eMate? In fact it seems to me that the concept of the computer was lifted from Apple. Gaudy colors, slimmed down OS and functionality, built rugged for students. Obviously the tech in the machine is a decade newer and as such likely significantly more powerful, but the same principles apply, low power footprint, small screen, readable outdoors.

Outside of some modernization of the concept and technologies can someone show me what this device does that the eMate didn't? The eMate even lasted up to 28 hours on a single charge. I don't want to discount what MIT Media Labs has accomplished, but it looks to me like another rip-off of Apple technology.

Here is a link to a picture and the specs of an Apple eMate 300.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/messagepad/s tats/emate_300.html