I kind of did an eye roll at the breathless language in the announcement. I'm trying to unpack that reaction, because I actually really enjoy the first-principles approach that they have taken with their work.
I think, perhaps, it's because there's a fair amount of praxis already out there in the enterprise and small business sectors about this, and I didn't really see reference to any of that, Lotus Notes notwithstanding. I know it's nitpicky, but it was a strong reaction so I thought I would share it. I'll try to unpack it more:
Basically, creating data processing tools for humans is such a fundamental application of computer science that we even have a name for it: Information Technology. And, ever since the Mother of All Demos we have been trying to make a kind of "omni-tool" for data processing, and pretty much falling on our faces.
This is perhaps because a "general purpose tool" usually turns out to be a particular kind of "special purpose tool". The question is whether a large enough segment benefits from general purpose tooling, which entails taking on the overhead of learning how to use this "tool that makes tools" in order to accomplish their many tasks. In other words, there's a layer of indirection. Or, are most people's problems disjoint and specific, so that they benefit more from using a few special purpose tools that can then be loosely coupled together.
For example, let's say for my job I have to manage the generation of reports, etc, and post them on a company website that I maintain. I can use a document editor to edit documents, a communication service to send links to the documents, and a web-based CMS tool to post the final reports to the website. It's not clear that I would be better served, or even could be served (due to the network effect), by an all in one tool-builder tool. Three special purpose tools, which can guide you effectively in each task, might be easier to deal with than one general-purpose tool, all user grousing aside.
This particular type of omni-tool could be described as a"Distributed Filemaker." Filemaker-like tools are definitely popular, but tend not to unseat other special purpose tooling. And they have a problem shared by all powerful data modeling tools: they provide you quite a bit of rope to hang yourself with. If you want to really improve in this space, I suggest you focus on providing a data modeling and coherency paradigm that is appealing to non-technical users, yet successful for managing long term data that changes meaning over time. That would be profound, as poor data modeling is pretty much how all of these projects eventually crash on the rocks. Your users will not ask you for such a thing though, as they don't understand it.
I think, perhaps, it's because there's a fair amount of praxis already out there in the enterprise and small business sectors about this, and I didn't really see reference to any of that, Lotus Notes notwithstanding. I know it's nitpicky, but it was a strong reaction so I thought I would share it. I'll try to unpack it more:
Basically, creating data processing tools for humans is such a fundamental application of computer science that we even have a name for it: Information Technology. And, ever since the Mother of All Demos we have been trying to make a kind of "omni-tool" for data processing, and pretty much falling on our faces.
This is perhaps because a "general purpose tool" usually turns out to be a particular kind of "special purpose tool". The question is whether a large enough segment benefits from general purpose tooling, which entails taking on the overhead of learning how to use this "tool that makes tools" in order to accomplish their many tasks. In other words, there's a layer of indirection. Or, are most people's problems disjoint and specific, so that they benefit more from using a few special purpose tools that can then be loosely coupled together.
For example, let's say for my job I have to manage the generation of reports, etc, and post them on a company website that I maintain. I can use a document editor to edit documents, a communication service to send links to the documents, and a web-based CMS tool to post the final reports to the website. It's not clear that I would be better served, or even could be served (due to the network effect), by an all in one tool-builder tool. Three special purpose tools, which can guide you effectively in each task, might be easier to deal with than one general-purpose tool, all user grousing aside.
This particular type of omni-tool could be described as a"Distributed Filemaker." Filemaker-like tools are definitely popular, but tend not to unseat other special purpose tooling. And they have a problem shared by all powerful data modeling tools: they provide you quite a bit of rope to hang yourself with. If you want to really improve in this space, I suggest you focus on providing a data modeling and coherency paradigm that is appealing to non-technical users, yet successful for managing long term data that changes meaning over time. That would be profound, as poor data modeling is pretty much how all of these projects eventually crash on the rocks. Your users will not ask you for such a thing though, as they don't understand it.
In spite of the eye roll, I wish you luck!