Same sentiments. In the beginning, the user and developer of the PC is the same person. I just feel that there are so much untapped computing power waiting for people to tell the computers to go do intelligent things.
Right. Early PC apps were developed by developers mostly for the developer community and PCs were used mostly by developers themselves as a cheap replacement for workstations.
When they started proliferating in the end-user space and experienced exponential growth in volumes, innovation took a back seat and commercialisation drove the chariot. Now that everyone's become rich, we need to get serious again about making it a lot more useful. Automation would probably be the first area I would address in that endeavor since the capabilities of the PC are now quite robust.
It definitely is an automation of tasks - it automates away you having to be concerned with multiple platforms, at the small cost of wasting computer power of all of your users.