I had somewhat accidentally been a Filemaker consultant for a while before that and saw how far non-programmers could get with a visual schema editor and GUI editor and some light scripting. They often made a mess, so I came into to fix things, but the fact that a small business owner could make a working custom inventory and invoicing tool with absolutely no training beyond the manual was incredible to me.
I'm really saddened by this shut down, for the continued reputation damage that's being done, because it's my baby (and you don't often get to create an entirely new public product at Google), and because I still believe that the world needs more and better tools that allow non- and casual programmers to build software to solve their own problems.