My dad called me last week, asked if I thought he should root his Android phone. The fact that my dad carries a computer around is not lost on me. He used to carry a chainsaw around for a living. I haven’t asked him which is more fun.

Google just made his question moot, because App Inventor will probably let him do what he wanted to without rooting (if you don’t know what rooting is, just ignore it for the moment).

But here’s my big beef about all this: “To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer.”

That doesn’t make any effing sense. If you use App Inventor, you are a developer. If you use a spreadsheet, you’re probably a developer. Certainly if you’ve ever written a macro, script, stack, or form, you’re a developer. Just own it, dude.

What Google has done, is make a nifty development environment. The people who use it are developers. Chances are, you’re not going to create the Next Big Thing (TM) using Google’s new juice. Because, statistically speaking, there’s only so much room for a Next Big Thing (TM), and it seems like Google is trying to be the ones who just made it. What, then, will you do with it?

If the world is just and good, you’ll use it for what computers do best: you’ll solve some problem, scratch some itch, meet some need. Hopefully you’ll use it like thousands of hackers used LOGO and BASIC in the seventies and eighties, and hopefully it will send some people down the slippery slope into picking software as a profession.

Because it’s damn fine work if you can get it.

But in the meantime, get the message straight: saying it’s not for developers is sort of like saying that chairs are for people who aren’t sitting.