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>Microsft has every interest in deskilling programming because they want everyone to be able to use and buy their programming tools.
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>To merely know a tool probably won't be worth much in the near future. If one is going to have any value it will be to solve some problem where the tool is merely incidental part of what you are doing.
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Hi John. I agree with this completely and have been thinking this for years. However, I dont think MS want to de-skill programming in order to get more people to buy their programming tools. Rather, they want to do this so that more people can write software that only works on Windows, integrates to their office suite, and to sell more per seat licenses of SQL. By making programming easier they indirectly help create the universe of software that supports their o/s and office suite dominance. This de-skilling does mean of course that coders become commodities and hence subject to commodity pricing.