I believe simpler solutions will occur through the ballyhooed "decentralization". What actually decentralizing tech entails is a rethink of the types of business that are in play and therefore the technologies needed for them.

Right now the assumptions are heavily entangled with the platforms: we know that our audiences are on "X". Therefore "X" becomes part of our strategy, and our end goal(from an evolutionary success standpoint) is to make them standardize on our "Y". This happens from all parties: devs, consumers, forms, governments.

Thus when I boot up Windows I'm confronted with a cacaphony of different updaters, notifications, etc. All of them trying to exploit the platform I'm currently using to pull me deeper into some other platform.

If we fast forward this process, we can see that the nature of computing ecosystems is to be a jungle that exceeds understanding. And in jungles, there are a multitude of niches. Compatibility is situational. Although one could point to apex predators, they don't exactly "rule" the jungle.

Which means that the appropriate goal to achieve in a software's lifecycle is most likely a sustainable niche that only needs to know about a few things. But our industry is not doing this yet. Why? Because software has not eaten the software industry yet.

That is the culmination of all these decades of churning on code: eventually we end up with software that is better at coordinating information and activities for society than any human-mediated organization could be. And you look at the technologies we have, and assume there's a logistical function to them, and it's like: OK, maybe AI can do that. Maybe blockchain can do that. Maybe cloud and no-code frameworks can do that. Maybe if you bodge those things together, you end up in a place where the professional developer isn't dealing with as many details, like photography vs painting. And if that's really the case then you don't have to write nearly as much of an app: it will start hooking into the ecosystem readily, instantly presenting the views on information that you need and filtering noise for you.

We haven't had a really fundamental realignment of the economy since the end of World War II. And if you look at movies from then, the economy that emerges is sensible within its concepts of how economies should move forward: information was still expensive and while many novel things could be mass produced, you needed firm structures to coordinate them(Newspapers multiple times a day! Icebox and milk deliveries! Mail-order houses!), and you needed a new set of infrastructure to animate this action. Highways, supermarkets, shipping containers, and TV were all representative of where the world was going: an ecosystem of "products and services". And you could learn what products and services a city had by walking through the phone book and making calls.

But over the past few decades, it's saturated into an "attention economy". There are so many goods available that you'll never know about all of them, so the information systems have to take up the task of digesting it and leading us towards our best lives. So the task of making software simpler is also a task of making economic coordination simpler. And we are still going to be using the products and services framing for some time, but it's likely to get weird.