Looking five years out, I think it's a no-brainer that consolidation will occur around sites that also control their browsing technology. Standards bodies can't make the kind of transition that's sure to come in networking in the next few years. To me, the activity around W3C looks like the stuff that goes on while the real transitions are happening in the market. The fights over expanded versus extended memory. Various mail APIs that were being pitted against each other while SMTP and POP were taking over the desktop mail systems.
Exciting software is what drives transitions.
And the Mac didn't boom until they erased the artificial 128K limit making way for Pagemaker, Photoshop, Excel, Director and other graphic apps that did something fun and useful with the memory. Periods of openness are followed by periods of closedness. To assume that servers will be licensable, that the protocols will be discoverable, is naive. The software business is played nasty. No matter what the standards-zealots say, the high ground belongs to the one who provides the software that excites users.