Matt Mullenweg said:

WordPress’ biggest challenge over the next two years, and where we’re focusing core development, will be around evolving our dashboard to be faster and more accessible, especially on touch devices.

This is a pervasive phenomenon in computer science & engineering, today - to prioritize the case of the 'small/mobile device'. Or as Matt identifies them, "touch devices".

It's pretty hard for me to grasp, or get my head around, the suggestion that the context of a desktop computer, and that of a cell phone, can be addressed as equivalent. That serious software people are shoving all their chips into the kitty, betting on cell phones as desktops, and desktops as cell phones. That they are betting the farm that the cell phone and the desktop can be married at the point of a shotgun, and everyone will live happily ever after.

I've scratched my head at this unlikely-seeming proposition for awhile now, watched it evolve at Ubuntu/Canonical, read how Microsoft and Apple (not such a long stretch) are working feverishly on their own versions. KDE and Gnome are turning themselves inside out to be part of the trend. And taking real damage to their 'actual' desktop usership.

In fact, "touch devices" were highly developed in the mid-1980s. Hobbyists built mis-named "light-pens" with a discreet optical sensors in the tip, a small electronic shaper-circuit in the barrel, and a cable or wire that reported to the computer. This light pen (touch device) would identity a spot on a raster screen (computer monitor or TV) to within a single pixel ... and the computer then provides visual feedback of what is being pointed at (with a cursor ... yeah, before the mouse). There were dozens of commercial and freebie models, in the 1980s.

Early IBM PCs were the market for a large range of special voice-recognition chips, and the Commodore-64 et al had built-in Analog to Digital converters which in part met the interest in software development for small-vocabulary voice-input (you spell individual letters, resulting in a sort of "ASCII-speech").

This is old stuff. OLD. Alternative input devices and IO formats have been the rage for decades. We had a very highly developed community built around the Palm-Pilot devices. Several tens of thousands of mostly small but often impressive programs rather strikingly like WordPress plugins were written and shared freely. Called 'hand-helds', they were of course touch devices.

Yet now, 'all of a sudden', the "touch device" tail is swinging the desktop computer dog's-body. Really? Amazing as it seems, there is no doubt that Leadership has gone all-in for it.

On the face of it, the phenomenon seems to be a illusion or mirage. To have cell phones is great. To have desktops is great. To think these two things are, can be, or ought to be transmogrified into essentially 'the same thing', seems like one of those unforced errors on major steroids.
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Is the real explanation 'the girls'?

Is it really that computers have historically 'scored' so abysmaly with females ... and now they are growing up inseparable from their (cell) phones? That no "sane" leader in the computer industry can fail to try to make his (yes, his) product seem equivalent to a cell phone? Whether it makes a lick of sense or is at-all likely to suceed?

So ... now "choice" is Bad, authoritative designers are informing us. Why? Because you can't have very darn much choice on a cell phone, obviously. Because girls Like cell phones. Because cell phones are the only form of the computer that has ever aroused a meaningful level of enthusiasm from the female gender.

Is that what this is really all about?