If you have been at this game as long as I have, you often find yourself either thinking or in conversation with older guys (and gals) who remain kind of stunned how badly we lost our way somewhere along the road to software "making our lives easier".

Think about it... When the earliest spreadsheet (VisiCalc) came out, people were truly stunned at just how much easier this would make their lives after years of paper, pencil, calculators, and even (wait for it...) doing Math in your head.

Now we have taken software of all kinds (SQL, Visual Studio, MS Office) and over-complicated it to a level where some techies will spend literally months "tweaking" and "fine tuning" it. And this is not to mention the number of support calls we get from clients running something as simple as MS Word, who can no longer find this or that special feature because Microsoft cant really improve anything anymore, they just complicate it to sell us new versions by making hair-brained changes like the incredibly-hated "ribbon".

Was this why we invented software? To go from making our work lives easier, all the way to today where even programming your cell phone qualifies you to operate the Space Shuttle?

Do I want tuning SQL to have more or less options? Simple answer. GIVE ME ONE BUTTON TO CLICK AND LET THE SYSTEM FIGURE IT OUT!!!

That was once the idea behind good software. But then, Intelligence is NO measure of common sense, and common sense left the software industry years ago. Now, we over-complicate things and the more we do that, the fewer people really know how to manage them. And as some of the older futurists pointed out, thats the expressway to chaos.

Whoo-hoo! Enjoy the ride.