> Rather: WHATWG was founded because the companies developing browsers (in particular Google) believed that what the W3C was working on for XHTML 2.0 was too academic, and went into a different direction than their (i.e. in particular Google's) vision for the web.

Mozilla, Opera and Apple. Google didn't have a browser then, hadn't even made the main hires who would start developing Chrome yet and hixie was still at Opera.