In the free software world, the functional boundaries between programs are, in fact, usually respected, even with interactive programs, where his "transaction costs" would apply. Emacs edits, awk does its thing, etc.
I think the reason programs creep in functionality is NOT these technical sounding "transaction costs", but in order to sustain vendor lock in. In a world where nobody worries about lock in, there is no reason to bundle an editor with a calculator with an email program.
In the Adobe world, the boundaries of the programs are pretty tight, with a little bit of bleed over. Counter example? Maybe.
That was not a great article, if you ask me -- I think the analysis was trite, and MS Office software probably isn't a good example of anything.
You're citing Emacs as an example of a program that does just one thing and respects "functional boundaries" unlike (say) the way that Word does some spreadsheet-y things and Excel some databasical things?
A standard Emacs installation contains, among other things: a Lisp interpreter, an adventure game, a mail program, a Usenet newsreader, a calendar, a calculator with symbolic-algebra features, and an implementation of Conway's Life.
Emacs is really more of a programming platform than a standard single-function application. It doesn't make sense to compare it to Unix apps like wc or ls. It's more similar to Bash, which allows you to combine built in functions and a whole host of separate programs (awk, sed etc).
Put another way, Emacs makes it easy to process text files, combining the built-in features and modes of Emacs with just about any Unix command-line tool (via M-x shell-command-on-region, or simply by processing the file from a terminal and passing the result back to Emacs). Word, on the other hand, makes it easy to do fancy word processing and associated formatting tasks inside Word, but makes it very difficult to share the resulting file with other programs (even different versions of Word).
I think the reason programs creep in functionality is NOT these technical sounding "transaction costs", but in order to sustain vendor lock in. In a world where nobody worries about lock in, there is no reason to bundle an editor with a calculator with an email program.
In the Adobe world, the boundaries of the programs are pretty tight, with a little bit of bleed over. Counter example? Maybe.
That was not a great article, if you ask me -- I think the analysis was trite, and MS Office software probably isn't a good example of anything.