They've experienced the first services-based model by the IBM et al. in the 60s and ran away from that by looking into alternative computing. That's where the personal computing came in. Unix was tangential to the problem not until free software (GNU) adopted it as it was the lingua franca of the research community and it seemed to walk a fine line between mainframe corporations and PC tinkerers. For more on this topic look into Fred Turner's book 'From Counterculture to Cyberculture'.
I was referring more to the fact that software sales and licensing (a delightfully dystopian version of which dominates the essay) is the business model that's projected forward.
Instead, we live in something of a bizarro-world of the IBM / EDS / Tymshare model, in which we-the-users don't pay for compute resources, but our eyeballs and manipulativeness is what's sold to advertisers / propagandists.
In a similar way, reading Arthur C. Clarke's descriptions of future digital technology --- his "minisec" from Imperial Earth (1975) foreshadows the iPhone wonderfully --- describes the hardware but not the business and financial model supporting it. The notion that a decades-old hand-me-down device from the protagonist's clone-twin-father would still be useful is also ... charmingly quaint.
At the same time, it has a few misses.
The nascent Free Software movement is ignored. I think that’s a general failing of the WEC crowd, which focuses strongly on consumer operating systems and software (CPM, MS DOS, Apple II, and at about this point the just-released Apple Macintosh), but not Unix which was also starting to become available through SCO and a number of other vendors. Eric Raymond seems to have entered the Linux world in large part by publishing his own FAQ for a time on various PC-based Unix options, most with a pretty hefty price-tag.[1] The WEC crowd seems to have largely ignored this at least through 1988. Not that they weren’t aware of it.
Another failure was not grasping the services-based model, though to be fair, that required a vastly more effective, higher-bandwidth, more-reliable networking infrastructure which was still about 15–20 years out. Widespread broadband access only really began around 2003, and wasn’t a principle access mode until another five years later. Arguably there are large parts of the population in the US still lacking adequate high-speed Internet. And of course mobile Internet, which began really 20 years later with the release of the Apple iPhone.
That said, it’s quite prescient and an interesting bit of history. Jay Finney, the author, has a number of other pieces up as well, and I encourage browsing through those.
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Notes:
1. http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt