This could be somewhat troubling for Apple. The company is doing extremely well at the moment, and I'm guessing that's thanks to Jobs. If he is forced to retire permanently, could Apple enter another death spiral?

No, there is nothing nefarious about it. There is something very "revocable" about it.

But it isn't relevant in this context. It doesn't make Google evil, as you seem to believe. It's a perfectly common protection clause, and will not allow Google to revoke anything otherwise.

I'd like to see Piers Corbyn and Joe Bastardi's predictions compared to the AWG "scientists".

I have seen them. Unfortunately for both of them, they are highly inaccurate. If you were to bet money on PC and JB, you would lose big.

Funny how Piers with a laptop and a great pattern matching computer (his brain) has successfully out predicted the MET office with their supercomputers and huge budgets for years and years.

This is not true at all. I know it's a popular claim, but it's false. On the contrary, Corbyn has consistently come up with bogus predictions.

Yeah, I agree. It's strange to support "freedom" by diminishing choices.

There'a bigger picture here, namely the freedom of the open web. H.264 hands over control over web video to an industry cartel. That's a very bad thing, as Microsoft proved when they held the web back for a decade.

h264 is open, but it also has patent issues

Ergo: It is not open. At least not as far as the web is concerned. The W3C has a policy about patent, and H.264 violates that policy.

The height of "openness" and freedom to me is the ability for me, as the user, to CHOOSE whatever format I want to watch or use for myself.

You can choose a browser which gives you the choice. But wait, no one does. After this, all browsers either support WebM or H.264. None of them give you the choice to support both. So what do you do? You should choose a browser that ensures openness. H.264 is closed, so it must be a WebM browser.

Wired is not the authority on web standards, but the W3C never made the claim that IE9 is the most HTML5 compatible browser. It would be very strange if they did, seeing as the current tests are very limited and basic, and far from test even a fracion of the full HTML5 specification.

You really should read the Wired article. It actually tells you what is going on.

The bottom line is that Microsoft submitted a bunch of tests to the W3C, and those are the ones that are the basis of this. There are tests by others as well, but Microsoft's tests make up a substantial part of the test suite. Furthermore, the number of tests is extremely small, so it's impossible to make any general statement about HTML5 conformance base on these.