Wealth & Money Quote by Jesse James Garrett

Garrett’s line reads like a humble-brag wrapped in a progress report, the kind of sentence that quietly founds a movement while pretending to merely document one. In the mid-2000s, “Ajax” wasn’t just a technique; it was a permission slip. The web had been trained to feel like a stack of forms and page reloads. By calling out “rich interaction and responsiveness,” he’s not describing a feature set so much as reclassifying the browser as a legitimate application platform - and positioning Adaptive Path as one of the labs where that future is being prototyped.

The specific intent is evangelism with plausible deniability. “We’ve been doing our own work” signals credibility: not hype from a vendor, but practice from a consultancy close to real products and real constraints. “Only scratched the surface” is the classic growth-frame move: it lowers expectations about current roughness while raising expectations about what’s coming, inviting clients, developers, and journalists to see today’s demos as appetizers rather than the meal.

The subtext is competitive and cultural. If there’s a “surface,” there’s also a depth others haven’t reached - and that depth implies expertise you might want to hire. It also nudges a new professional identity into being: interaction design and UX as strategic leverage, not decoration. Garrett’s cautious optimism works because it flatters the audience into joining an early wave, when the web was about to stop feeling like documents and start behaving like software.