I see your point but I also think that in the 90s the computing world was more open and accessible. I guess that happens to most maturing industries. The market players become bigger and start aa dominating​. Around 1900 a guy in a garage had a reasonable shot at building a car in his garage (or an airplane) and start a business. Not possible anymore. You need millions to get even started.

I was a teenager in the 90s, and the consensus among most of the adults I knew working in tech was that it was over. Microsoft had won. Programming was a commodity, all the tech jobs would be outsourced to India, and you were much better off getting into finance.

Remember that towards the end of the 90s, Netscape - the one promising new startup that threatened to break the Windows monopoly - had just had its ass handed to it by IE, with some spectacularly underhanded tactics. All the dot-coms had required hundreds of millions in funding and were rapidly blowing through them, with no sign of a profitable business model.

Hope didn't really return to techies until the mid-2000s, when a bunch of events (Google's IPO, acquisitions of Flickr & del.icio.us, development of Rails/Django/JQuery/MySQL, and founding of Facebook, Reddit, and YCombinator) made people realize "Hey, maybe it's not the end of history after all. People have actually been doing pretty cool stuff all this time when we weren't looking."

2015 seems like it was the new 2000. That'd put us around 2002-2003 right now, complete with the huge focus on P2P, security, and government overreach, and with a couple years to go before we realize that not everybody gave up.

Interesting perspective. In the 90s I worked on handheld devices like the Apple Newton and that a lot of fun and there was a lot new and exciting stuff happening in that area. It seemed a much smaller world where you could keep track of what's going on.

Yeah, there was tons of interesting stuff happening in R&D in the 90s. The problem was that Microsoft held a complete strangehold on distribution, which meant that for the average consumer (i.e. teenage me, not in Silicon Valley, and everyone I knew), it might as well not exist. I remember, when I first started to read academic papers and surf programming sites in college around 2003, thinking "Holy shit, there's all this cool stuff that was invented over a decade ago, and I can't use any of it unless I switch to UNIX."

What happened in the mid-2000s was that open-source software (and later Apple) finally broke Microsoft's hold on the route to the consumer, and suddenly small teams of people could deliver software that billions of people could use. There's a similar situation in R&D now; I remember that when I left Google 3 years ago, there was a whole lot of really cool stuff being developed that has yet to see the light of day. No corporation can hold innovation back forever though, because of Joy's Law: "No matter who you are, the majority of smart people do not work for you."

But that wave of innovation was fueled by Moore's Law... now deceased.

Mature industries, absent disruptive technology changes, tend to consolidate and be dominated.

I have a somewhat contrarian prediction for Moore's Law. I think the next wave or two of innovation will obliterate the current progress of Moore's Law.

Yes, Moore's law may seem to be slowing down right now, but all you need to do is look at the size, energy consumption, and ability of a human brain to realize that nature has blindly created a much more advanced "technology" than what we currently have.

Next, look at flying. Birds are nature's most advanced flying machines. We've been able to expand on that to the point where we have jets and even reusable rockets that can go a thousand times faster than the fastest bird.

Right now, computing is at the "man puts big flaps on his arms and jumps off high ledge" point. Once we figure out the "first airplane", AKA wright brothers moment, Moore's law will explode.