As everywhere consumers of IT products can also be stratified - Niche Users, Enterprise Users and the Masses (Three is easy, we can have more levels of classifications if you wish). The Niche users will have to pay the premium, Enterprise Users will require to optimize on an large budget but the mass users will require a commodity without the overhead of managing a large IT team - in most cases this segment will have one laptop and one user/techie all rolled into one - or some more small change.
IT commodities targeting these large mass market should be treated separately as compared with the Enterprise. In today's world the common man who wishes to deploy a small office automation or a home improvement tool is treated as a miniature enterprise. With computing and communication devices integrating and shrinking in size, on the one hand there are devices that empower the masses but on the other IT infrastructure is not catching up - either for the end users or for the developers in this space.
The small IT user cannot afford the real estate for a server room and the overheads, cannot hire a dedicated team servicing back up and managing offline connectivity, will not have the ability to test every upgrade and would not want all these nuisance that these large enterprise level applications will bring with it. He is however willing to comply with what ever the infrastructure advises as standard upgrades on a click and wish every thing else will work fine.
On the same line a developer would want an infrastructure to bring in these automation. A database that is integrated with an OS or an end to end automation suite, that provides for automated incremental back up on a pre-specified host. A simple communication protocol that is almost real time - enterprise visibility can be on a request basis using an e-mail request except in some specialized cases where they will possibly use the telephone line (and at the most a modem - or Outlook like infrastructure that will manage all forms for communication not just e-mail traffic guaranteeing delivery and managing acknowledgements and logging). The end to end infrastructure for data access, interface mechanism, security, reporting abilities, logging should all be defined and standardized within the application with the developer burdened only with building the business functions on a rigidly structured infrastructure. The choice would be on what OS platform to base the application on or on how many to port this.
It is not that this has not been done. There are small tools in the market but importance that this segment deserves has not been harnessed by the platform providers. Development environments of large scale products have highly optimized and restructured workbenches standardizing the output from these tools. Till such a time somebody has the patience to sit and design an environment - will it be some mobile device vendor who has a hidden agenda of reaching the masses - a small time developer, either for commercial or personal use will have to create an API library for data access, error handling, interface, security and all and hope that new technologies will never emerge.
I hope this happens sooner than later...in my lifetime at least..this will become another hobby which is profitable too for the independent spirited :)
