Precisely. The history of personal computing since the eighties does have something to teach us about "the power of variety". It teaches us that consumers don'

Precisely. The history of personal computing since the eighties does have something to teach us about "the power of variety". It teaches us that consumers don't rate variety very highly compared to consistency, software compatibility and -- above all -- price. In the early 1980s there was a wide variety of microcomputer operating systems and hardware platforms to choose from. Today, we are down to two operating systems, broadly speaking -- Windows and Unix -- and pretty much one PC hardware platform, built around commodity x86 processors and their associated commodity motherboards and peripherals. Commodity PCs grew to dominate the market because they were a commodity, which is another way of saying that they were essentially all the same. For a while you couldn't even get them in a different color; if you didn't like beige you had to go buy some spray paint and mod your own case. If you bought a PC you knew that it would support a standard monitor and a standard PC mouse and a standard PC keyboard and would run Microsoft Excel if you wanted to pay the standard price for the standard-issue operating system. The major reason why PC manufacturers proliferated so wildly was price, but that battle is largely over: Twenty-five years of price wars and middleman-elimination, aided by the internet, have done their work, and now literally everybody has their hardware built by Foxconn or some other company within half an hour's bicycle ride of Foxconn, and it all costs roughly the same feature-for-feature. It's just a different world than it used to be.