Every now and then I have similar complaints, but I don't think it boils down to cli vs. gui - the situation is actually far worse. Building high quality produ

Every now and then I have similar complaints, but I don't think it boils down to cli vs. gui - the situation is actually far worse. Building high quality productivity tools that are able to exceed the expectations of expert users is both difficult and time consuming... and there is almost zero market incentive to accomplish the task properly for consumer-class applications. [edit] this is not to imply that consumer apps are trivial -- I think I once saw Minsky discuss an early attempt at AI that started by interpreting children's books, thinking that would be easier than understanding journal publications, etc. -- it quickly became clear that the task of parsing a children's story requires an immense store of implicit context and as such, was completely intractable at the time. The challenge of writing 'simple' things like email, text editing, and spreadsheet apps seems related to that.