>>You've speculated this several times. Obviously, no one could have predicted the greatness of Fox and Dr. Dave in the late 1980's, but the world is a very different place. I'd love to see a nimble young firm, but surely you acknowledge that a "lean-and-mean machine" is many times less likely.

You have a smartphone. Consider writing a data app for it that will make you rich. Will you do it only for Android, or would you like it to work on iPhone as well? Maybe even on Blackberry or minority platforms like WP7? How will you achieve it? None of the oldster big boys do cross-platform tools because they're all protecting their patch and hoping to rule the Cloud. So you are reduced to writing multiple variants, as GoDaddy had to do with its mobile app, same with Angry Birds etc etc.

Now imagine a dev tool that generates pseudocode with an interpreter for the important platforms so it can run there, stores data in SQLite and spools automatically to Cloud. Write your front end and see it run on any platform. Does it meet a need? Absolutely. How hard will it be? Not all that hard, actually. I'm not the only one saying it: check out Titanium and Rhodes, both of which claim to "compile" web apps to run on multiple phone platforms using traditional web development techniques. A screen designer and 4GL is just one extra step.