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This is really tempting, but my guess is that the answer is going to be no. Users want something that just works, and they would probably rather dig through a pile of stuff to find that one thing that just works rather than script it themselves. Elegant solution > pile of features > elegant scripting > source. Or you can do it all, like Excel. Even Word has scripting. I think ahoyhere has alluded to the reason why the pile of features tends to win, and that is because it is better at leveraging the economies of scale in the shrinkwrap software business. It is so cheap to distribute software that you are much better off building for the mass audience. Now the hot thing is webapps which do not scale nearly as well (but avoid most of the junk that comes with shrinkwrap scaling, like having to deal with a strange machine and a crappy OS that deluges the end user in spyware, or pushing updates to users you don't know much about), so there is more incentive to meet the needs of a niche audience. And Apple is having some success sort of splitting the difference (vertical integration from the hardware up, and attempting to exert more discipline on developers to increase quality, all at the expense of distributing software to mass audiences). Microsoft, of course, is still in a pretty dominant position from exploiting this scaling to the max when IBM so graciously made the hardware into a commodity mass market item. So far, the most successful web app (Google) is the one which has made web app discovery scale like nothing else (every page with useful content on it is a web app - code, data, it's all the same). The brilliance of Google is that it captured a mass end user market with a minimal user interface. They did it with math (maximal leverage of plain text queries plus the structure of the web, and similarly with ads which have simple interfaces at both ends and are backed with sophisticated algorithms), and scaling by imposing unusual amounts of internal discipline on the best developers they can get (and they can get pretty good ones). All this just to get to a position where they might be able to compete with Microsoft as a platform, and unseat the power of shrinkwrap scaling. I think the only way they can do it is by attracting a lot more developers than Microsoft, and the only way they can do that is by taking a lot of Microsoft's developers away. They might be able to do it, but there are all sorts of challenges. My guess is that what will happen is that they will draw a lot of developers away from Microsoft, and in the process they will lose a lot of their external cultural influence as far as being able to promote clean interfaces. Web apps will be even more dominated by the everything in one place aggregators (exemplified by Amazon and eBay) than they are now. The problem with nice UIs is that there just aren't enough good developers to make it scale. |