What do Users really want?

From: Philip Haddad (philip.haddad_at_gmail.com)
Date: 11/25/04 

Date: 24 Nov 2004 18:21:52 -0800

I have been reading PG's "Hacker's and Painters" this past week, and
he advocates the idea of startups strongly. He also makes the strong
point that to create wealth, you have to make something people want. I
have been thinking about this, and I wonder what users really want
future technology to be like. What do the user consider "cool" ideas.
I have a feeling it won't be a low-level floating-point math lib or
anything :-)
What do other programmers want? I read in "Queue" the other day that
VMs are making a comeback. Does this mean that the Java trend will
continue to expand? Wouldn't it be fairly trival to implement a VM in
CL? Since it supports Garbage Collection and dynamic typing I would
have to think that a VM in Lisp would be even more effective than one
written in Java or C. Here I am not talking about a language VM, but a
hardware-level VM.
Just some thoughts that I had bouncing around in my head. Where is the
future of user applications going. Will they be server-client models
like Graham thinks they will? Will the desktop environment slowly
dissappear over the next 50 years or so?
Overall "Hackers and Painters" is a very thought provocing book, and I
have immensely enjoyed reading every page of it. 

-- 
Certum quod factum.
Philip Haddad