> If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix philosophy that so many designers and developers p

> If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix philosophy that so many designers and developers prefer. Word, Excel, SAP, Photoshop, Salesforce, JIRA. Setting aside for the moment the fact that Unix itself is also incredibly successful (both in a commercial and mindshare perspective) the items in that list are not necessarily commensurate. Yes, they all have lots of features, but Excel and Photoshop were definitely built for their users, whereas SAP was not so much. As a consequence, Excel and Photoshop have very enthusiastic user communities, and SAP (et. al) users gripe a lot. My thesis is that Excel and Photoshop were built around empowering the workflows of individual users. As such, it becomes possible to market directly to the users, even if someone else ends up writing the check. Products like JIRA, Salesforce, and SAP are intended to optimize the flow of an organization. There's no single user you sell the software to that will benefit from using the software independent of what other people are using. Also, the Unix philosophy isn't about limited functionality - it's about achieving rich functionality by having orthogonal bits of functionality that can be composed together in new and unexpected ways that can be reasoned about. Programs/applications within Unix may be simple and single purpose, but Unix itself is not. Likewise, we may look at Excel as an application and deem it to be overly complex. However, as a platform Excel is fantastic in that it has lots of independent pieces of functionality that can be easily combined together.