Success Quote by Jesse James Garrett

Garrett’s line lands less like a prophecy than a venture-grade pitch: Ajax isn’t just a neat trick, it’s a platform shift, and you’d better budget for it. Coming from a businessman-turned-design thinker (and the guy who popularized the term), the intent is strategic as much as technical. He’s naming an emerging pattern, branding it, and nudging organizations to treat responsiveness as a competitive advantage rather than a developer indulgence.

The subtext is about power moving from the page to the experience. Early web apps trained users to tolerate the clunky ritual of full-page reloads, a kind of institutionalized waiting room. Ajax promised something closer to desktop software: partial updates, quicker feedback, interfaces that feel alive. When Garrett says “important development,” he’s quietly redefining what “web application” should mean: not a website with forms, but a product with state, continuity, and a relationship to the user’s time.

Context matters: mid-2000s, broadband adoption rising, Google showing off Gmail and Maps, and businesses realizing the browser could be a distribution channel without the friction of installs. “Its importance is only going to grow” is a bet on user expectation. Once people get used to instant, fluid interaction, going back feels broken. It’s also a warning to companies: technical debt isn’t just code; it’s latency, jank, and every unnecessary refresh that tells users you’re behind. Garrett’s genius here is framing a bundle of existing techniques as inevitability, then making “keeping up” sound like basic competence.