Publishers matter more than Programmers

This article has an intriguing statement:

It’s the publishers that matter, not the programmers. To put it another way, programmers can solve problems once and share open source. Publishers have to keep solving markup/publishing problems for content and design numerous times continuously, and have much less chance of being able to share their solutions. That, plus the fact that there are many more web designers than programmers, plus simple economics, means the best solution is to optimize for ease of publishing, and let iterative open source solve the programming problems.

Stated more broadly, “Programmers should optimize software for ease of use (by non-programmers).” This is more important than optimizing for ease of development or extensibility. However, I think we must balance this ease-of-use goal with an aim at simplicity, otherwise we tend toward feature creep.