"the trend Jason's commenting on here is tailor-made for high-performance, multiplatform development languages and tools,"
It's a trend where? And what exactly do you mean by "tailor-made?"
"(Python and a host of others)"
Python does not qualify as "high-performance," sorry.
All you're really doing is throwing around buzzwords about something you don't really seem to understand.
"are sucking all the oxygen out of the room and using it to give life to systems that would have been impractical as traditional waterfall-cycle apps."
A "waterfall-cycle" refers to a generalized approach to developing software that is independent of programming language or platform. To connect it to particular development languages and tools is rather silly. You can certainly use newer approaches with older languages.
"At the rate things are going I expect that, within a decade, only a tiny fraction of the software that the average consumer (or business user) uses will be recognizable as 'Windows.' Or 'OS X' or 'Linux' or 'JoeBob's OS.'"
Perhaps, perhaps not. The OS will certainly change, but as far as becoming unrecognizable, I have serious doubts. Especially when it comes to Windows and Mac platforms, being recognizable is a key part of their business model. Microsoft and Apple certainly want you to know when you are using their products.
Even if the OS changes drastically, they're still gonna be concerned about branding.
And as far as changing drastically goes - just look at what happened with Office 2007. It was the biggest leap in UI design for word processors in a very, very long time - yet it sorta divided people, with some liking it, others not.
"I ask them to take one of their experienced office staff (who more than likely is most experienced with Word on Windows) and ask her or him to sit down in front of something different, type a two-page memo, make review corrections, and email it. The time to accomplish this ? in an application, an OS and/or a hardware device different than 'the usual' ? is routinely only slightly longer than it would have taken in the current office standard for that individual who is inexperienced in at least one of the three major aspects of the task."
Let's see: Experienced in an alien environment vs inexperienced?
Actually a surprising result, considering an experienced person should already know about the task, even in an alien environment, and would pick up cues about how to accomplish the task faster than the inexperienced individual. I would have expected the experienced person to take a shorter time.
"This is a powerful argument against the obsolescent perception that standardizing on a single way of doing 'everything' is a business necessity of greater value than the risk it enables."
No, it's not a powerful argument at all. A more proper experiment would not be changing two variables at once: The current experiment has the two variables of experience and environment. By changing both variables at once, you have invalidated the experiment and possibly skewed the results in your favor.
All I really see here is you have no idea what you're talking about. You're using your vocabulary more like a marketing department rather than a skilled worker. It's not very convincing at all.
Discussion on:
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