I'm not happy and optimistic and I see problems everywhere. What do you want - things that annoy me on a national scale? On an industry-wide scale? Personally? Things that could be solved with small amounts of software? Large software? Website?

Problem 1: There's too much software. I can't learn it all. Why do I still have no better way to take a quick poll around the office than sending everyone an email and having everyone reply (too much email), or creating a custom website (too much effort)? Related: I think Microsoft Infopath might help but I don't know and all I can find about it quickly is marketing waffle - why isn't it easier for me to find out if a given program will help me and how to use it? Related: often when whinging online someone replies with a program that might help, yet when I try to search in advance I just get spam shareware download sites offering the top 20,000 shareware programs that might help and no way to find good ones. This is related to the problem of the sheer amount of software in the iPhone Appstore. Which are the games I might want to play?

Problem 2: I have cool ideas that I don't have enough interest to learn all the things I would need to know to put them together. The asterisk phone system has awful call logging. The MIT simile project is nice. It would be good to have an ajaxy javascript timeline call log with clickable links to replay the call recordings using e.g. the embeddable yahoo flash media player, searchable (preferably with speech recognition). All doable, maybe not even a lot of work for a full time html/css/javascript coder with asterisk knowledge.

A script that runs as a cron job and saves router and switch configs to a DVCS system with a front end like github crossed with django-admin. Sounds simple enough, great for an open source project. http://www.tadasoft.com/ have made a program that costs $10,000 for 500 devices per year just to do this. Problems: faffing with SSH, telnet and secure password storage and custom firewalls with weird interfaces and learning enough about everything to make it workable.

Summary: Finding good software is hard, creating good software is hard, plugging existing software together is hard. I don't know if there's a solution in a better form of online tutorials/examples, a more forgiving/higher level scripting setup, more standard kind of interfaces, other. What I would typically expect is a smug reply saying "math is hard" or "suck it up". Wow, helpful.

Problem 3: I need to work on a project with someone from another company. Why is there nothing in the space between Microsoft Project backed by Sharepoint libraries (huge and complex) and Basecamp (tiny and not locally installable)?

Also related to problem 1: If there is software out there, what is it? Also related to someone elses reply here: Use workflow software. Great! I'd love some that isn't as enterprisey as Microsoft CRM. A small program that half a dozen people can install, that spots each other by Bonjour and ... keeps track of internal projects so I don't have to by hand.

Musing:
Visio is unpleasant to draw diagrams with but the results are good. Being able to sketch on paper and have the sketch turned into a visio diagram would be cool - rough circles turned into neat ones, rough lines into neat connections, this symbol into a server, that one into a building.

I don't want "tries to explore the network and draw a diagram for me", or "draw on the web and export in visio format", but I do want "get the same or similar results with less hassle".

We have very powerful graphics cards and decent AJAX-y web sites. Why are my network diagrams like on-screen-paper? (I use this analagously to 'writing Java in Python'). Why aren't they more 3D, more interactive, more searchable more animated, more ... multiplayer, more like the Windows pipes screensaver?

When someone calls me and tells me they have a problem with a program I don't use, why can't I go to a website, find the program and see clickable screenshots of all the key areas so I can guide them to the settings they need?

Remote controlling a computer is slow a lot of the time. For support work I could get use out of a program that just screenscrapes text and shows it to me in the relative positions. i.e. turning a screenshot into a lighter weight balsamiq style sketch outline + text.

Whine whine whine ... you get the picture!