We can learn from the way Microsoft turned its Office suite into an application-building toolkit. Microsoft took what it had, the Windows operating system and the Office suite, and managed to cobble together an application-building toolset by adding integration tools such as DDE (dynamic data exchange) and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). This approach was widely adopted because Windows users had little choice.

     In order to build the restaurant menu application fragment, I (1)built Gateway components that connected my Smalltalk-based wiring tool to the Microsoft Access database using DDE, and (2)built some Smalltalk classes matching the database structures in typical Object-Relational Mapping style. [1] This experience suggests to me that motivated business users can do a lot with a relational database, a minimal spreadsheet for doing calculations, and a minimal text editor, plus a basic repertoire of corresponding projector components.

     The two-sided application model will be viewed, I believe, as a much simpler and more natural way to connect functions together into applications than the way Microsoft users had to. And it will build Web-based and mobile applications.

     I believe that repurposing a few office-suite applications as Business Objects can be a good starting point on the Producer side. On the Consumer side, the wiring tool needs a basic set of projectors that, in combination with these Business Objects, will roughly reproduce the user interfaces of the office applications. That, in my view, will be enough to engage a group of innovators.

[1] See http://melconway.com/Home/craft2018/035.html (from 2:50, in an earlier version of the wiring tool) for a dialog that displays an SQL SELECT verb API.