Especially business apps where users can be trained to use a more complex but more efficient interface. The web drives us all to create "universal" style applic

Especially business apps where users can be trained to use a more complex but more efficient interface. The web drives us all to create "universal" style applications that anyone can use more or less without training. There is definitely a danger of "dumbing down" our software too much, but for most purposes I think it is orthogonal to the technology used. I suspect mobile apps have done far more to dumb down software than the evolution of the web in recent years, for example. Part of the problem is that good tools to develop more powerful, flexible software haven't been available on some of these platforms. For example, JavaScript only discovered modular design relatively recently, and even today its community is still fighting early battles like how to manage dependencies and how to build larger projects efficiently. The tools are decades behind the curve compared to how we make desktop, server and embedded software. Another part of the problem is that a lot of the people developing web and mobile apps are relatively unskilled and inexperienced, either having never worked outside that part of the software industry or having moved into it from a less technical role like graphic design or marketing. They don't even realise how far behind the curve their tools are, because they wouldn't recognise or know how to use more powerful tools if they had them. There's also the non-problem that for many purposes, dumbed down software does the job just fine. A great deal of useful, real world work does not require massive business software suites, bought for staggering sums of money from big name suppliers. If there's one thing we've learned from the software success stories of recent years, it's that very often the information you're working with is relatively simple, and the abilities to organise it and to communicate about it with the right people in a convenient way are worth a lot. There's nothing wrong with providing those abilities to new users in a simple way that does not require extensive training; in fact, it's highly desirable to do so.