>>You can offer an opinion that you think it ought to be, and I won't debate an opinion.

FWIW, Panasonic introduced one of its cool pbx offerings about 10 years after Windows 3. That PBX essentially was a consumer device by the beginning of this century and now largely is replaced by commodity Asterisk devices. Had Panasonic behaved like Microsoft and its familiars, the PBX still would occupy a closet and would require an expensive white-coated PBA boffin to manage the clever complexities required to use such a complicated device as a telephone that never can be a commodity because it's too special. Sorry but every other "profession" apart from law and IT accepts that standardization and simplification of ordinary processes leads to better results. Lawyers and MS familiars earn $ by insisting that the opposite is true, but pride cometh before a fall and IT doesn't have barriers to entry like law. There presumably always will be a need for top practitioners for the backend and for niche experts who can provide exceptional value, but not for legions of expensive "experts" trying all different things to get their jollies and get paid a bomb for it. In the end "good enough" usually is good enough especially if it costs an order of magnitude less. Meanwhile the smart money is moved to devices same as it moved to Windows and its encouragement for consumers to implement and run stuff themselves rather than getting wound up in the mainframe model.