Butler Lampson summed it up best: Apple knows how make things "yummy".

Actually, one of the ideas articulated and advanced by Alan Kay is that non-technical domain experts should be the people that design and implement most line-of-business apps, and that their IT departments should only do optimizations.

One of the reasons that is may not have worked vis-à-vis the RAD platforms like Access and Excel is that the GUI part always looked polished irrespective of the quality of the program.

But, Scratch programs always looks like toy prototypes, so they never fool the non-technical user into thinking that they built something indistinguishable from what experts do.

Presumably, optimization doesn't necessarily mean making it run faster, but rather is about making is scalable (which means things like cleaning the codebase, addressing security issues, etc.).

Google Now even started out with the code name "Majel".

Well, at least some people on the MS shell team thought it was better because it would allow them to develop two different shells for regular and advanced users. See: http://www.reddit.com/r/techno... and http://www.reddit.com/user/pwn...