It's hard to articulate; I feel like I've seen the pattern before at least twice, and soon after there's a game-changing disruption. The two previous instances would the browser and web services. This time? Adaptive structural decomposition.
Congratulations on stumping all of DuckDuckGo, Google, and my own linguistic inferential ability with that term.
My curiosity is piqued, might I ask for an elaboration?
Edit: Wait a sec, found something, this it?
It needs an essay-length answer, and I'm not quite ready to do it yet. And at that, it's conceptual, addressing my subjective view of content/interaction problems in different domains, and my equally subjective view that they're isomorphic to some other technical problems for which we have or are converging on solutions. Some might find it aggressively different, others a handwaving restatement of ideas that already exist. I don't want to be a tease, so rather than saying more I'll start making notes this weekend.
I think you're half-right, but the most exciting thing happening right now in technology are some of the expensive cool technologies turning into commodities. This doesn't have the "wow!" factor of new breakthroughs, but is an important step. Soon-ish (10 years?) everyone will own a smartphone, which means a computer in your pocket. That's pretty cool. Also, the mobile web stuff is pretty cool, and the ability to get high end scalable cloud hosting for relatively cheap is cool.
These aren't major breakthroughs the way social news was, the way better search was, the way better email was, etc. I do see less of those, but new competition and collapsing prices in cool technologies is a really good thing, even though it doesn't set off the wow factor so much.
I can't reconcile those two clauses.