Back in the 1980s, a movement was under way against the technology priesthood—the people who made it difficult for individual users to take control of their machines. The priesthood had lost power, and the individual pretty much ran his own show. But the priesthood has reemerged with a vengeance, and it has reined in the individual user so severely that progress in software has stagnated. This is because companies limit the number of applications they allow employees to use, users are discouraged from doing anything themselves, and software programmability has been reduced to nil. Even Word's macro language has been de-emphasized.

Basic programming, too, has evolved from useful, easy-to-learn BASIC, COBOL, and Fortran to languages such as C++ that users can't casually code. Even scripting languages have become more complex.

The industry has changed from a dynamic business with individuality expressing itself on many levels to a humdrum, monastic computing style not unlike that of the mainframe era when the priesthood was in control. Microsoft and the other software companies that evolved with the personal computer are partly to blame. They shifted away from empowering the individual toward empowering the enterprise. Now software even checks itself in with the corporate mother ship over the Net so the user can be approved to use the product. How charming.

To compound this problem, there are fewer products available today than there were 20 years ago, when users could choose from dozens of competing spreadsheets and word processors. The overall market grew over time, but the selection shrank. This phenomenon has always fascinated me, and it comes to mind when people tell me that the garage-based company making a cool new product cannot survive in this market anymore. Why not? These sorts of companies did well when there were fewer than a million computer users, but they cannot make money now when there are 10 billion users? I do not even want to get into the fact that the phony-baloney patent system hampers innovation in this arena.

So here we are sitting in a Ferrari F60 idling in the driveway. What fun.

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Go off-topic with John C. Dvorak.