Why HTML 5 is Vital to Cloud Computing

Tim Oreilly of OReilly Books has written a piece on the bet that Google is making on HTML5. This is a good introduction a)to some of the key features of HTML5 and b)where they stand in terms of implementation by the key players in the browser and smartphone community. Here are some of those key features of HTML5:
1)Structuring is enhanced with <header>, <footer>, <section>, <aside> and other meaningful tags which have nesting and interelationship rules;
2)<video> and <audio> tags break the dependence on Flash or QuickTime player for adding your own sizing controls and basic behaviours to  video and audio embeds;
3)DOM revisions place all the tags on the DOM tree and in a uniform manner including addressing elements/tags. This, when implemented, eliminates browser differences and developer headaches;
4)XForms 2 updates features and options to forms elements that have not changed in 12 years;
5)Several new tags to accomodate new Web 2.0 capabilities:

mark represents a run of marked text.

meter represents a measurement, such as disk usage.

progress represents a completion of a task, such as downloading or when performing a series of expensive operations.

time represents a date and/or time.

canvas is used for rendering dynamic bitmap graphics on the fly, such as graphs or games.

command represents a command the user can invoke.

datagrid represents an interactive representation of a tree, list or tabular data.

details represents additional information or controls which the user can obtain on demand.

datalist together with the a new list attribute for input is used to make comboboxes:

keygen represents control for key pair generation.

eventsource is used to set up a persistent connection with a server of which messages (events) can be received.

bb represents a user agent command that the user can invoke.

output represents some type of output, such as from a calculation done through scripting.

ruby, rt and rp allow for marking up ruby annotations

http://dev.w3.org/html5/html4-differences/

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

So given this small list of factors determining the direction of Web, Mobile and Desktop presentations and computing who should come recently knocking on the  W3C door to make “some comments” on HTML5??? You guessed it the one major vendor who is way behind on implementing [and de-proprietizing] HTML, CSS, DOM, SVG, XFORMS, E4X, JavaScript, JPEG2000 and other Web Standards – Microsoft [ARS Technica is most generous and  very diplomatic in describing Redmond’s interest in HTML5 here].

My question is an Obama-like one – why treat the Web standards breaker so tactfully? Their IE Web browser monopoly is going the way of the dodos. Why not demand more of Redmond [like rigid schedules/commitments to  CSS 2.x + 3, DOM, E4X, and other longstanding Web standards adherence] ?? Or is it to the other browser vendors advantage to just let Microsoft slide – quickening the demise of IE8 and Redmond as a major Web+Mobile player?