Photos as home pages: Is the Internet growing up?

There seems to be a slow emergence of a new style of home page - of one dominated by photography. We saw it first with Bing, which wow'ed us against the plain white of Google. Three examples of I've recently come across of companies predominately using photos are

1. Cool startup join.me ...
   
   
   
2. 37 Signal's redesign of its suite, starting with Highrise
   
   
   
3. And even a venerable, old establishment, such as Goldman Sachs
   
   
   

Photos give home pages an entirely different feel to weird patterns (like the background to this site) or plain colors (which is typically the case. To me, good photography suggests maturity - but this could be just me who thinks that. What do think? Will we see photographs become more prominent on the home pages of more websites?