His later reflections on hiding complexity from the user made me reflect back to the huge mistake made in the early Data Warehousing days when plans were made as if the business intelligence tools were going to be put in the hands of all employees needing to tap corporate data. No one wanted to deal with the ponderous overhead of the tools — so 'service groups' of BI tool jockeys were put in place to use the tools on the behalf of others. That really diminished the anticipated potential of these technologies.

It looks like we're finally back to delivering on the promise, only the heavy lifting is being done by search.