What Dropbox does is eliminate the programmer from the equation. You don't need your IT staff to do any special setup or to follow a special process. I think

What Dropbox does is eliminate the programmer from the equation. You don't need your IT staff to do any special setup or to follow a special process. I think the truth is business users don't want to work with you - they just want their data relationships to be discovered in a simple and intuitive way. If your data crawling is sufficiently good, maybe you can do that. I understand the point the article is making, but I feel rather strongly that "(y)ou’ll want a third thing – to read in and parse data" translates to the person that builds a tool that does that nicely and automatically creates pivot tables, graphs, and other dashboard-y things will probably have to hire a team to shovel the money off so he/she can breathe. I suppose it's an ok example to talk about this re: statistical programming languages, but my own experience in the three requirements that preface the whole discussion (pivot tables, graphs, data parsing) are a big example of something just screaming for a new solution, not a new prog language . . .