
Microsoft Launches PowerApps, Makes Building Business Apps Easier - DeFlanse
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/microsoft-launches-powerapps-to-make-building-business-apps-easier/
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gregmac
From the official post[0]:

> Quickly create apps that work on any device using a Microsoft Office-like
> experience, templates to get started quickly and a visual designer to
> automate workflows.

It seems to me that every one of these "make software development drag-and-
drop" frameworks has the same problems, which is when you eventually need to
do something the product didn't envision, you either spend a significant
amount of time fighting the framework to make it work, or simply can't do it
at all. It's fine if you need a basic tabular display of data, or a plain
form-based editor, but once you want to display multi-dimensional data, or
edit a set of dynamic user-defined fields, you hit a wall.

Looking at the tutorials[1], as a developer, I have basically zero interest in
this. I am pretty sure it will suffer the problems exactly as I described
above, and on top of that, be a very unproductive way to work (visual and
mouse-centric). I am sure I am not alone in thinking this.

At the same time, complex business logic is still complex logic -- and it
seems to me the type of user/"developer" that would use this is not the type
that can figure out and handle complex logic well.

At least there will be a future market for real developers to maintain or
rewrite these badly-developed but inevitably business-critical apps; I wish
the best of luck to those poor souls.

[0] [http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/11/30/introducing-
micro...](http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/11/30/introducing-microsoft-
powerapps/) [1] [https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-
us/tutorials/](https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/tutorials/)

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codelitt
Microsoft seems to be getting tired of startups nipping away at their
enterprise customer.

The biggest question in my mind is whether the New Microsoft™ or the Old
Microsoft™ that built/released this. If it's the latter, I see this going the
way of Sharepoint (which is mentioned as one of its integrations).

