>It seems to me that, as apps become easier for end-users, they are harder to develop. Instead of 1 million users moaning in frustration, you now have a small developer group doing so. Hard on the developers, sure, but probably better for the business world overall.
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>Sure, people complain about feature bloat and bugs in Windows apps. Take a moment, though, and step back and look at what you get for a couple of hundred bucks by buying Office, Win2K, etc. Pretty amazing.

I guess I still don't understand why it has to get tougher for developers.

When we buy Office, Win2K, etc for a couple of hundred bucks, we get more features than any one individual could ever use, or would have dreamed of 10 years ago. But these improvements did not come at the expense of usability. If anything these packages are more powerful and easier to use at the same time.

I see the opposite happening with modern development languages. We are getting more features but at the expense of usability. A number of years ago pundits were predicting that CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) would make programmers obsolete. When the CASE promise faded, all attempts at using the power of the computer for software development seemed to move much slower than the rest of the industry.