While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong.
You can sit your Grandma down at her computer and have her type in “please make me a website for my sewing club that includes a sign up form and has a pink background” and AI will just do it and it’ll probably even work the first time you run it.
15 years ago tossing a website on Heroku was a pretty new concept, and you definitely had to write it all on your own.
10 years ago Kubernetes had its initial release.
Google Drive and Slack are not even 15 years old.
TensorFlow is just hitting its 10th birthday.
I think you’re vastly underestimating the last 15 years of technological progress and in turn value creation.
25 years ago we had wysiwyg editors to build web pages, and she could just include a link to email her to have people ask her to "sign up" (the entire point of a sewing club is to socialize. You don't need an automated newsletter or whatever. That's for people that want to sell you something). You'd put it into the space your ISP gave you, or Windows actually included a personal web server. You had to be somewhat technical to use the Windows server, but it could've been made more friendly instead of being removed, and personal computers should make it easy to share a static website.
We've clearly regressed since then. People think you need an engineer or AI to build basic web pages. My actual grandma was doing some of this stuff when I was a kid in the 90s, as was I.
What happened to the web seems analogous to me to as if we abandoned word processors and spreadsheets and said you need a six-figure engineer to do custom programming any time you need the features of one of those things.
You should not look back on those solutions and neglect to acknowledge their limitations. Access can only handle small databases (maximum 2GB) and about 100 simultaneous connections.
Access is basically a product of the technological limitations of its time. It isn’t designed the way it is because that way is the best design.
The kind of business that relied on Access is going to find that solutions like Airtable are far easier and more powerful, and certainly less prone to data loss than mom and pop’s shared drive. There are even open source self-hosted alternatives like NocoDB and Baserow (or cloud hosted).
You’ll inevitably complain about the subscription cost of SaaS solutions but it’s not like MS Office business licenses were ever cheap.
Explain to me how you did that 15 years ago. Ask on stackoverflow and wait for a human to respond?
You’re also taking my example application way too literally. No I don’t know why Grandma needs a signup form, I just couldn’t think of a web app off the top of my head.
And my goodness you’re acting like you’ve never heard of Squarespace, which is 1000x better than Geocities ever was, by the way.
MS Access and WSYWIG tools like FrontPage and iWeb were not good. I know because I was there and I used them at work. A link to your email (spam spam spam) is not a replacement for an application with a database.
Apart from doing the styles and layout, I don't think current tools have less friction. They're a lot safer though. Can't say I never dropped a production database.
I definitely agree that it’s a reasonable choice.
As for grandma, 15 years ago she could have just posted her sewing club on Facbook, she doesn't need Heroku or AI.
I would say that these technologies/products being so wildly popular puts burden of proof on you to show me some kind of evidence that these technologies aren’t productive. Like are you trying to say that something had better deployment velocity and reliablity than Kubernetes at handling high-complexity application infrastructure deployments for large enterprise companies? What was it? Why was it better than Kubernetes?
The analogy is that you’re basically saying that zippers aren’t really better than buttons but then literally everyone is overwhelmingly wearing pants and coats with zippers and very strongly prefer zippers. So really it’s on you to prove to me that I should be using pants with buttons instead.
Finally, there’s a lot of irony in your first paragraph complaining about a few tech oligarchs becoming fabulously wealthy and then suggesting that Grandma just use Facebook instead of building her own site. In any event, my web app example was just a poorly thought out example of a web app, I really just mean a website that has a little more utility than a static site.
The juice hasn't been worth the squeeze. You can look at all societal indicators except the stock market pointing downward to get to that conclusion. Nothing is actually better than it was in 2010 despite Uber, Airbnb, Kubernetes, Slack, and all the other SV tech "innovations". People are not happier or wealthier because of the tech coming from Silicon Valley. In general the end result of the last 15 years of tech is that it's made us more neurotic, disconnected, depressed, and angry.
We don't need "better deployment velocity and reliability for high-complexity application infrastructure deployments for large enterprises". Listen to yourself man, you sound like you've been hypnotized by the pointy-haired boss. The tech sector makes false promises about a utopia future, and then it just delivers wealth for shareholders, leaving everyone else worse off.
Grandma especially doesn't need deployment velocity, she's being evicted by her landlord because he wants to turn her flat into an Airbnb. She can't get to the grocery store because the town won't invest in public transport and Uber is the only option. She's been radicalized by Meta and Youtube and now she hates her own trans grandchild because her social media feed keeps her algorithmically outraged. Oh, and now she's getting scammed by AI asking her to invest her life savings in shitcoins and NFTs.
> The analogy is that you’re basically saying that zippers aren’t really better than buttons but then literally everyone is overwhelmingly wearing pants and coats with zippers and very strongly prefer zippers.
I don't agree that the ubiquity and utility are necessarily correlated, so I don't see the zippers and Kubernetes as analogous.
But the proliferation of zippers has more to do with the fact they are easier for manufacturers to integrate into products compared to buttons -- they come pre-measured and installing them is a straight stitch that can be done with a machine, whereas installing buttons is more time-consuming.
Zippers are worse for consumers in many ways, repairability chief among them. But really they are part of a general trend over my lifetime of steadily falling garment quality, as manufacturers race to the bottom.
> In any event, my web app example was just a poorly thought out example of a web app, I really just mean a website that has a little more utility than a static site.
You said it, not me. We had the technology to throw up a static site in 2010 and my grandmother could actually do that with dreamweaver and FTP, and it worked fine.
2. Like it or not, the customers of the tech industry include a lot of large enterprises that do find value in improving velocity and reliability for complex workflows. I am not some kind of corporate sellout for pointing out this plain factual reality.
3. I totally agree with your points about income inequality and happiness metrics among our population but they are not relevant to the topic at hand.
4. If Dreamweaver and FTP is your barometer, recall that Dreamweaver was an expensive paid product. There still are plenty of FTP-based web hosts and you can totally throw up a website with a tool like https://trix-editor.org/, which as I mentioned is a tool that did not exist 15 years ago. You can also just pay for a website service like SquareSpace or Wix (or not, they have free tiers).
The fact that specific individual tools do not exist/are not supported anymore is irrelevant, as there are dozens of often-better tools for throwing a website up that are definitely friendly to novices. Let's not forget the plethora of no-code application development tools that are mostly a recent development.
Mobile users prefer apps 60% over websites. So the real modern barometer is: could your Grandma put up an iPhone app in 2008 following the developer tutorials using Objective-C or would she have a much better time using Swift and/or a no-code app development solution?
You're assuming that people wear pants with zippers because they have a preference for it, and not because you literally cannot buy pants with buttons in 99% of stores.
based on your examples, I'd say you're vastly overestimating
sure, those are all new techs, but it's not like you couldn't do those things before in different ways or they are revolutionary in any way
In case you also need to control Spotify from Windows 95 :D
I'd argue that compared to a decade. 15 years ago, relatively little value has been created. If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result.
Yet in this time the US has doubled its GDP, most of it owning to the top, to the tech professionals and financiers who benefited from this.
And some of this money went into assets with constrained supplies, such as housing, marking up the prices adjusted for inflation, making average people that much worse off.
While I do feel society is making progress, it's been a slow and steady march. Which in relative terms means slowing. Of I gave you $10 every week, by week 2, you'd double your wealth, by the end of the year, you almost didn't notice the increase.
Technology accumulation is the same, I'd argue it's even worse, since building on top of existing stuff has a cost proportional to the complexity for a fixed unit of gain (and features get proportionally less valuable as you implement the most important ones first).
Sorry got distracted from my main point - what happens when people stop believing that these improvements are meanigful or that technology that was priced in to produce 100x the value will come at all (and more importantly the company you're invested in will be able to caputre it)?