How the rise of the web turns the server stack a lot less relevant

Wildly off-topic: the google io video (last one on the page) has subtitles appearing in 'real time' on a screen as the guys are presenting. It seems to be autogenerated, as the text is very close to what they're saying and I noticed one small phonetic error, but they are much more accurate than any other auto-subtitles that I've come across. Anyone know what's being used to generate these?

I could see a feature were the server side will just be a PaaS-like service, where only the client side code is needed anymore. Database persistence, handling of static assets and all that will be done by the platform, and most people won't know how it works or care.

For example Meteor goes into this direction, though there is still some server-side code involved, most of it is shared with the client, including database access.

Of course we still have long way to go to really abstract this out this far, but I think it will be possible in the future.

I think the backend won't shrink by any stretch, but the concerns will certainly change.

Instead of generating templates and managing interface state the server-side developer will be focused on cloud-based rendering, streaming, distributed parallel calculations, etc.