In my defence the new bit was "in IT" not technology generally. IT is the operation of information infrastructures by major enterprises. And the timeline was 30 years. Laptops were very, very, very uncommon 30 years ago!

Cloud computing isn't just shared servers - it's a shared application infrastructure. It's extremely different from the old mainframe model.

I have to say I do think that operations could be better without new silver bullets, but the scale and pressures on IT and business operations in general are dragging them to a precipice. Things are now so complex and demanding that at some point we may well see major organisations fray and disintegrate because they just can't run themselves anymore. Something close happened with the cyber attacks on Maersk and the NHS a few years ago - but from what I've seen it's quite possible that someone big will get themselves into such a tangle that they suffer a complete operational breakdown without an attack.

I agree on the Cloud app infrastructure but again it's more or less the 'aesthetics/experience' of it that has made it so widespread.

From the way the UK has been handling basic aspects of IT such as the spreadsheet that ran out of rows and missed a lot of Covid tracking data, the basics are yet to be figured out.

This is really a fight over the definition of "new", isn't it? The transistor was something you can point to. "Decades of incremental process change" isn't, but makes just as big a difference.