"The end of dumb software"

"In the age of rapid cycles and connected data, how long are we going to have to settle for dumb software?..."

"...I have tens of thousands of people in my address book. Some of these folks were put there ten years ago and, alas, are dead or long gone. Do I really have to go through and delete people manually? Why isn't my address book smart enough to sort the list in reverse order of use, so I can see records I haven't encountered in seven years first and start from there? Or, better, why doesn't this address book hook up with other address books of trusted peers and automatically correct and update?

The people who make desktop software are making themselves obsolete. When you start developing on the web, your default is to be smart, to interact and to be open (with other software and with your users). Desktop software (like Word) is insanely unaware of what I do, why I do it and who I do it with. Right now, the desktop folks have the momentum of the incumbent. Not for long. Time to hurry."

via Seth Godin

I'm always surprised by the lack of intuition that a lot of software possesses. Who in their right mind would build an infrastructure without a thought to ease of use? Then again...

Too much intuition in software can be a horrendous mess. Take Seth's example, Microsoft Word. Half the time, it autofills and autocorrects and auto-make-me-a-latte's INCORRECTLY. I would figure about 80% of the time, I have to self-correct the autocorrect. Now, of course, this might just be a failure on my part to understand the inner workings and settings of Word, but do you think there's a line that cannot be crossed with automation in software? Is there a point at which "smart" software is so smart that we assume its correctness and don't bother to examine the actual information?

That, I do not know.