Spolsky Drops the Big One

Joel Spolsky posted an astounding essay a few days ago that I somehow missed. I don’t agree with every paragraph, but every paragraph is worth reading. If I may pick one minor point out for a bit of special highlighting: We’ve had good full-text search technology since the Seventies, and in the last ten years more or less everybody has become a regular user of full-text search. Why isn’t there good built-in full-text desktop search available right now today on both OS X and Windows, out of the box? (Most of the article isn’t about search, most of it’s about why the Windows API is dying on the vine; don’t miss it.)