Which gave another huge boost in audience. Many sites and services of whatever one could imagine, cross platform and often free to use.
Good for population in general, who won't tinker anyways.
Bit of spectrum example, not just black and white.
I sure hope you're wrong. It's definitely happening in some respect and to me it feels like we are undoing the shift from corporate controlled, centralized computing to personal computing where users are in control that happened from the late 70's through most of the 90's.
I've posted this quote here before, but I still think about it all the time. In Ellen Ullman's excellent book Life in Code she quotes Whitfield Diffie:
> We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.