Science & Tech Quote by Jesse James Garrett

Ajax gets sold as a shiny product you can buy, and Garrett is cutting that story off at the knees. By insisting it "isn't a technology", he reframes Ajax as a cultural and organizational shift: a way of building the web that depends less on single breakthroughs and more on recombining mature parts. That phrasing matters. "Several technologies, each flourishing in its own right" is a quiet rebuke to tech marketing, where new labels are often used to launder old ideas into fresh budgets. He’s telling executives and developers: stop waiting for a silver bullet; the future is already in your toolkit.

The subtext is strategic. Garrett coined and popularized "Ajax" in the mid-2000s, when Google Maps and Gmail made the web feel suddenly alive. The industry needed a name for that sensation, and names have power: they create categories, create conference tracks, create job titles. Yet he also knows that naming can mislead. Calling Ajax "a technology" would imply a standard, a vendor, a proprietary edge. Calling it a convergence keeps it honest and keeps it adoptable. It lowers the barrier to entry while still granting the movement coherence.

"Coming together in powerful new ways" signals the real pitch: the innovation isn’t the ingredients (JavaScript, XML/HTTP, DOM updates), it’s the experience they enable - responsiveness, continuity, the illusion of software inside a browser. Garrett’s intent is to shift attention from fetishizing components to designing interactions, a business-friendly argument for why better UX is not decoration but competitive advantage.