"...have more Office users build applications to offload these requests from overworked developers"

Nooo!!! This is the same as letting people make the structural plans for their house by themselves. BAD IDEA(tm).

The number of time I've been called to "fix" a "great application" written by a secretary with no knowledge of structured programming... said secretary not needing to comment the code, of course, or even clean it up after a dozen hit-and-miss attempt at making it work... said secretary having LEFT, of course.

Why is it that just because it's a computer with a GUI interface, people believe that any idiot can do programming?

Ever since I joined the data processing department I have read of many efforts to make me superfluous. It hasnt happened, well struggling a bit at the moment while retraining takes its effect, but it was retraining into a different technology, so I expected some difficulties.

Anyway, we had The Last One, DJ AI Systems, which was going to read a definition and generate a bug free system. We have had software houses asserting that all software will be pre packaged. We have had dozens of 4GL languages and Microsoft re inventing everything back to the 50s. Quite, well ...

What have we learnt in all of these years ? That users with a bit of knowledge are a damn nuisance, they consume inordinate amounts of technical support time and all of a few lines of <4GL, Other generator name> which no one wants to use, but if they do, it is the IT department that has to sort it out.

Now, I have no doubt that this product is a good idea (for someone) and that it is well developed and would make life easier for professionals. If you take a product like, Focus (from Information Builders), which is handed to end users to produce reports (remember MIS), you find a proliferation of reports, all exceedingly similar, and only one is used. Which one? is in the mind of the user, when they leave, you have no way of knowing what they were doing or were trying to achieve.

SQL was intended as an end user tool, so users could manipulate the database without bother the Data Processing department. Now, hands up, who allows users to use SQL direct against the corporate database ? Anyone ?

So don't do it anywhere else either.

Just because one company has developed a product doesn't mean you should all jump to using it, especially with programming tools.

would anyone really use something with the word "mashup" in the title for serious business purposes?

No, seriously, from a business point of view this has to be great.

Sell a product that allows the management, who has no technical know-how whatsoever, to define their own security rules and object definitions.

And who, in management, is going to actually, you know, READ THE MANUAL ? Who is going to take the time needed to implement a test environment ? How many suits are going to worry about side effects before going in and implementing their latest brainstorm in production ?

The management is going to love it, fiddle around with it, and - most importantly - continually break everything. And when something is broken, what will management do ? Ring IT, of course, and issue a terse "fix it !" command because, you know, this thing has to work RIGHT THIS INSTANT.

And IT will slave away at the trash that the managers put in until it's fixed, get no thanks at all for their efforts and just pray that those suits won't break the thing again in the next five minutes.

I think we've got a winner here !