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Advocates of the iPad and its locked down single vendor store based kin contend that End Users will gladly trade a nearly complete loss of freedom for stripped down user interfaces with fewer bugs that save them from having to make choices. Gone are the days of General Purpose Computing, computers are destined to devolve into consumption oriented appliances where End Users will forever be paying for each and every scrap of restored functionality.
But there is another path. The path taken by programming languages like Lisp and Scheme and by internally extensible software applications like Spreadsheets (host to the most common form of End User Programming) and recent Hypertext environments. Such systems, offer a range of powerful primitives that can be combined in an infinite number of ways to meet any given End User’s personal needs. They empower End Users to craft their own solutions or to mix and match components from other sources. They don’t discriminate between commercial and non-commercial solutions, since no one economic model is best at meeting real world needs, nor can any one vendor know which tools are best.
An optimal workflow will often draw on both free and proprietary software and when found, it should be possible to encapsulate such a solution so it can be shared. Indeed, it is this sort of compositional freedom that holds the greatest potential to empower End Users and simplify life.