Let me start off by saying I think Popfly is cool. I am impressed by what that team has been able to accomplish. But you know what I really want, I want Popfly - Enterprise Edition.

What do I mean? Well, I've always been focused on the enterprise developer.  The pure web jazz is cool, and all of it makes its way eventually to the enterprise - just see AJAX, RSS, and more as examples.  So how and why does Popfly go to the enterprise?  Popfly is the perfect tool to give to end business users to construct ad hoc applications.  One thing that has pseudo-disappeared from the Microsoft portfolio is the "ease of access" that VB6 provided to end business users.  Access still provides some of that ease of access, and so does VBA inside of Office, but VB6 presented an approachable environment for "part developers" full time business folks. 

Now, there were a ton of negatives with that VB6 model.  It included  is writing supportable code, learning curve, and others.  One of the biggest was the burden placed on a company's IT department when those apps eventually had to be centrally supported, migrated, updated, etc.  That why I love the idea of Popfly - Enterprise Edition.  IT developers build the blocks, end users build the mashups.  IT folks could focus on exposing data sources, providing aggregration services, different view types, etc.  Then business users, using a centrally hosted and managed tool, can go out and mash together enterprise services and data into the applications they need.  Grab an SAP order block there, aggregate with some CRM data there, and pass it on to a visualization here.  Coolness.  It is the next step in the whole "web portal" and "business intelligence" landscape in my opinion.  I think end users would love it, and I think developers would love it.

Is that is Microsoft's plans?  I have no idea.  I haven't heard anything along those lines.  But I think it is a cool idea.  At a minimum, maybe Popfly will serve as a model for a possible approach to building futures apps that need to be composed by end business users.

Thoughts?