The author explains the trend of lower innovation in personal computing, which I think we all feel, as to do with corporate greed and the solution is "academics, non profits, non-VC funded companies, hobbyists" etc. But this is not a great explanation because human nature didn't really change since the 1980s, yet personal computing did.

These sweeping but vague explanations are tempting, but I think the cause is actually a lot more technical and random: the OS design culture that spawned Windows, UNIX and macOS pre-dated the internet. The internet was a fundamental shift that changed everything, and yet the NT and Apple design teams all traced their roots back to the pre-internet era (and Linux just made a UNIX for the PC, same thing, design rooted in the 80s). Their whole OS design thinking was fundamentally pre-internet and never caught up. Even basic tasks like uploading files to a server through a GUI STILL aren't well supported in desktop operating systems, in 2023!

What platform did fundamentally get the internet? The web - born of the internet, made of the internet. Web apps don't even start up without the internet. Whilst Microsoft snoozed, Apple thrashed around and the UNIX people spent all their efforts on cloning the past, web browsers became the new way software got distributed. The web had so many benefits over writing PC/Mac apps. Suddenly you could iterate every day, you could write the bulk of your software in nice high level scripting languages, your software was accessible by just typing in its name, you could use databases instead of designing binary file formats, app UI was automatically portable between operating systems, typography and layout were taken seriously, people could easily discover and access your software with one click on a link, the platform had a nice open easy to use protocol set up for you out of the box. And dozens more.

So many wins for developers and users in there. Unfortunately, it was never meant for this. People spent vast effort hacking the web into a barely-passable app platform because it was the closest thing to an Internet OS, and nobody else was offering that. But the web was simply never thought about by its developers in terms of empowering personal computing users. Whilst the people at PARC, NeXT, Apple, Microsoft and so on spent lots of time thinking big 1990s era thoughts about making programming easy, computers powerful, component systems, filing systems with search, AppleScripting, better window management and so on, this utopian way of thinking never entered the culture of browser developers.

There was a brief attempt at some sort of structured higher level planning, that open hackable spirit during the W3C era, but the XML stack was made by academics and despite good intentions a failure. So browser makers just kept randomly flinging stuff into HTML, but without the animating forward-looking spirit of the PC era, in fact without much of a vision at all beyond trying to keep the show on the road and better competing with 'real' app platforms.

It could easily have been very different. If the people doing OS development in the 90s had fully understood the importance of being an internet OS we might have had things like a global filesystem namespace, start menus that could directly launch sandboxed OS-native apps from a domain name, internet sharable clipboards, who knows what else. Unfortunately that's not how it worked out. Today OS research is basically dead. ChromeOS is the newest and probably the least powerful, least ambitious OS ever made. On the rare occasions people get to make a new OS they never make it past micro-kernels. The kind of sweeping ambition that launched the PC era is gone.