The "dancing bearware" metaphor in Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum has provided a lot of traction lately for the discussions I've been having with daughter Nora about computers and why they largely suck. Cooper's point is that a lot of software is like dancing bears - they dance poorly, but we're so inured that we're just excited that they dance at all.

So eight years ago I would have been all excited by this: "Wow, look what they can do with Java!" But really, why not just put up a couple of static pages with a list? Or if you really need to be fully clever, a little php glue to a database? This is dancing bearware.