Our first bastion is websites, you can think of it as filling in the gap that Microsoft left when they killed VB6. 15 or so years ago, someone could open up VB6 draw out a couple of forms and put together a simple "Line of Business" app themselves without having spent 10 years of their life becoming a professional programmer. The modern VB6 would do the same for websites. :)
> Unless Eve brings a 10x improvement to those tools
We know the bar is pretty universally an order of magnitude and so we've planned accordingly. Our primary target here is selling a super power: you couldn't do this at all before, and now you can. Joe in accounting doesn't have the opportunity to build things to support himself (short of studying programming), but with Eve he could do everything from automate several of his workflows, to building a dashboard, to building dynamic reports for his bosses, to creating internal tools to track and measure things.
There is a fairly clear gap in our ecosystem around these kinds of programs and they represent what I would argue is the vast majority of programs that should be written, but aren't because of the cost.
There's also the opportunity to just make websites an order of magnitude easier to build for programmers and we're getting there. I was able to write an entire editor for this thing in itself in a week for one of our prototypes - there's some real potential there.
> 15 or so years ago, someone could open up VB6 draw out a couple of forms and put together a simple "Line of Business" app themselves without having spent 10 years of their life becoming a professional programmer.
There's plenty of people throwing together simple LOB apps (including, particularly web apps) now -- with a wide variety of different tools -- without spending a decade becoming a professional programmer. And using similar workflows as they did when VB6 was around. Visual designers with minimal code didn't go away when VB6 did, and the place where there are the most competing ways of doing this is on the web.
> Joe in accounting doesn't have the opportunity to build things to support himself (short of studying programming), but with Eve he could do everything from automate several of his workflows, to building a dashboard, to building dynamic reports for his bosses, to creating internal tools to track and measure things.
That's exactly the pitch for lots of things that are on the market now (to pick one among many, without any particular intention to claim its the best in the field, Zoho Creator).
> Our first bastion is websites, you can think of it as filling in the gap that Microsoft left when they killed VB6.
They've created LightSwitch. LightSwitch is also a great example for the usual outcome of using RAD tools: You often come pretty soon to the point where the provided abstractions are lacking some functionality or performance. The customer / user doesn't care how the software is built, it's compared to the greatest there is.
> Unless Eve brings a 10x improvement to those tools
We know the bar is pretty universally an order of magnitude and so we've planned accordingly. Our primary target here is selling a super power: you couldn't do this at all before, and now you can. Joe in accounting doesn't have the opportunity to build things to support himself (short of studying programming), but with Eve he could do everything from automate several of his workflows, to building a dashboard, to building dynamic reports for his bosses, to creating internal tools to track and measure things.
There is a fairly clear gap in our ecosystem around these kinds of programs and they represent what I would argue is the vast majority of programs that should be written, but aren't because of the cost.
There's also the opportunity to just make websites an order of magnitude easier to build for programmers and we're getting there. I was able to write an entire editor for this thing in itself in a week for one of our prototypes - there's some real potential there.