As an M$ hater from last life I've to disagree it's more expensive. You numerate the instance where they've lost value, but can you even count the value it produced over the years by lowering the entry bar? I don't even excel, but it unarguably produced way more value than it's taken away. I tend to believe history speaks for itself, solely unethical practices won't undermine truly superior products. 50% of the population aren't stupid by definition, they just specalize on different things.
Those work not done by specialist, would not have been done by a specialist nicely, it simply won't get done at all, we just don't have the scale. Of course there's a fine line in some cases it produces negative value, but more often than not it's some value discounted by maintenance versus zero.
We’re agreeing. Excel produced massive value because it accepted catastrophic failures. That’s my point.
The problem isn’t Excel. It’s trying to get Excel’s accessibility in infrastructure whilst demanding engineering reliability. You cannot have both. Kubernetes won’t accept Excel-style disasters, so it still needs specialists; now specialists who must learn the abstraction and the fundamentals.
You’re right: work not done by specialists often wouldn’t happen at all. That’s the choice. Accept Excel-esque failures for democratisation, or accept expertise is required.
My point is that currently available tools promise both, deliver neither.
We're mostly agreeing except I'm optimistic about current generation of tools being closer to assembly > C than C > VB.
There are good signs AI would eliminate whole classes of costly human errors, whether the new classes of machine only problems would cost more as models iterate is remain to be seen, which I think would be lower. I'm not super optimistic about the social economical future coming from this but from a pure tech standpoint I'm optimistic about building cost.
Edit: also to address reliability, I think a lot of things are net positive to this world without five 9s, heck even two 9s.
Those work not done by specialist, would not have been done by a specialist nicely, it simply won't get done at all, we just don't have the scale. Of course there's a fine line in some cases it produces negative value, but more often than not it's some value discounted by maintenance versus zero.