If there is no other lesson to be learned from Microsoft, it is that the easier you make it for ORDINARY people to develop add-on content for your product the wider acceptance of your product will be.

Before Microsoft, it was Borland’s Turbo Pascal, which allowed you to put together useful applications within minutes.

Of course the downside to some of the modern drag and drop development systems is that the resultant programs all tend to look alike (this can be good or bad, depending on your application). As soon as you want to do something that isn’t represented by one of the building blocks you can run into trouble.

New iPhone users who are not technically oriented must feel overwhelmed by the huge numbers of things to chose from, particularly if you want something that doesn’t fit into one of the iTunes categories.

Messy business.