Intentional Software Lives... But Did It Miss Its Window?

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

It's been many, many years since the news broke that Charles Simonyi, whose claim to fame was his work on Microsoft's office suite, announced plans for his company, Intentional Software, to make creating applications as easy as creating a PowerPoint presentation. This has resulted in some level of ridicule, as there are still plenty of people who think that the ease of creating PowerPoint presentations is actually a problem that has resulted in poor decision making. However, when put in the context of "situated software", Simonyi's idea starts to make a little bit more sense. The idea is that many individuals don't need a big app that scales, but just need a simple app to do what they specifically need it to do.

Unfortunately, though, over the last few years, Simonyi has seemed a lot more focused on going into space than on what's happening in the market. A ton of companies have entered the space in the intervening years, offering up simple tools for non-programmers to create simple programs to handle the basic tasks that they need. Every time yet another one of these would launch, we'd wonder whatever happened to Simonyi's project? Apparently, it's still going, as Simonyi took part in a conference this week again claiming that its too hard for business people to create applications. That may have been true five years ago when he started, but has he looked around lately? Plenty of such systems have launched. However, the problem hasn't been a lack of tools -- but, a lack of interest from people to actually use those tools on a widespread basis. Perhaps he really has something different up his sleeve, but it would help if there were a bit more evidence that there's a real market for this type of offering.

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