Comment by fit2rule

I actually think that there has been a long-term awareness of this fact in our industry, for decades now, and its one of the driving, motivating factors behind the entropy of the field. The OS-vendor guys know if they improve their OS'es, the systems-programming guys will get automated away, and if they get automated away, the applications-programming guys will be next .. so, subtle imperfections and flaws in the way things operate at a system level are allowed to persist, such that further downstream there are still opportunities to perpetuate the need for hands-on engineering. I can think of a few examples of where it feels like OS vendors/systems developers intentionally hobbled the functionality of their environment in order to make the long-term viability of the industry more resilient ..

So, I think it'll be a long time until 'the people at the top' get what they want. Until they start coding a replacement for Dropbox or SublimeText that will be the end-all of filesharing/file-editing, we'll always need another IPFS, another Atom, etc., etc.