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."