From a post by Evan Williams   founder of Odeo a podcasting portal that had something for everyone which  seems rather close to the aphorism   " if you want to please no one, try to please everyone"  and example highlighted below.

 Not building for people like ourselves – Williams doesn’t podcast himself and, as a result, the company created web-based recording tools that were too simplistic.

 I'm admittedly an audio geek ( in relation to 90% of the population , but prolly only  40-50%   in the company of real audio geeks , note I don't count the "hi fi" crowd in such  way too much magical thinking  for me)  so naturally my bias is towards bringing people closer to my ideals than  condemning them basic tools because they don't get it.   Maybe they don't need to?  I hate flash recorders that stream audio to the server the quality on all the public incarnations I've seen to date sucks and not for ease of use, but because they are dead ends.  Your quality , after basic settings, is fixed,  buy yourself a nicer mic, process the sound going in ad a mixer and it still sounds  the same.  It's not the simplistic that kills it  it's the output...  "it's good enough for.... "  Upping the bit rate on record is possible but  say you have 20 people recording a show at once the cost soon gets to be EEP inducing. It's good enough for free. 

It's good enough for people that want to leave a message not that want to talk for 30 mins...  Have we become so inured to the quality of cell phones and  the, compressed to hell and back  radio , that it doesn't matter any more?  Seemingly the above suggests that it does and hopefully the next generation avoids this problem.

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News ish:    Adobe already have a full featured sound editor, Audition  and they've just released  a beta of Soundbooth which is a hybrid between a task based editor and music creation application for those that work with sound but not as their primary role.  It looks very interesting and I'm curious where it's going to fall price wise on release.   Sadly the system I am tied to here lacks the memory, speed and  just about every other requirement one needs to mess with audio.