Agree with sentiment but want to nitpick a bit. It’s unclear that the Roman Empire collapsed at all. Many Roman institutions lived on well past the 5th century and were assimilated into gothic Frankish Visigoth etc societies.
Here I was expecting deep truths: spend time with those you love, don’t squander your time on meaningless drivel that neither enhances the mind nor expands the heart. But all I got were software engineering life hacks!
Yes, Apple is really good at creating usable, beautiful user interfaces and vertically integrated solutions. Yes, it's very difficult to quantify this, and yes consumers get it. However, Apple isn't the only company focused on getting the experience right.
Once the UX of a competing platform/product is on par (modulo product/company loyalty), Christensen's low end disruption model kicks in. The way Apple can continue winning is to be ahead of the curve, creating new features and product categories that can dominate, until the low end disruption model catches up to them.
(reposted from blog): I don't see how the claim that "Backbone by itself is not sufficient for building complex web apps" is controversial. There is a clear need to go beyond the functionality provided by Backbone, as evidenced by the popularity of great projects like Tim's Backbone boilerplate and layout-manager.
Great post however many things don't fit the pattern. For example, lacking precognition, your search app can't know what people will search for. There are many similar UI examples, where you can't do stuff until you get input from the user, leading to a fundamentally synchronous (from a user's perspective) transaction.