The state of the software tech world according to a skeptic, misanthropic, curmudgeon BOFH who is definitely buying iPhone 4: Software is mostly on cruise cont

The state of the software tech world according to a skeptic, misanthropic, curmudgeon BOFH who is definitely buying iPhone 4: Software is mostly on cruise control today, and much like pop-culture endless eating itself, dying, and shiting itself forth again, software is fast converging into a bland, daytime TV amalgam of Facebook-Apple-Amazon-Google. (Or as 4chan'ers will call this new multi-corporate-entity: "new FAAG".) Exciting!! The kind of software just around the corner makes you want to nerd rage, amirite? I mean, can you imagine, by 2020, we will still be writing HTML, CSS, JS, arguing about browser standards and Canvas2, while struggling against the Telco's crippled, quicksand-slow network speed, and juggling an ever changing incestuous brood of gatekeepers who hoard our data to scrape pennies from the advertising equivalent of the world's biggest penny cup. 2020, welcome to 2010. "Innovation" is the biggest weasel word in software. Most new software is going to be an incrementally trivial variant of something you've already seen, probably decades ago. And it's all because we've nearly reached the inflection point of "peak hardware." Like the prescient chief of the US patent office back in the 1800's, I will now modestly paraphrase and state that 99% of all software that could ever be invented has already been invented. The rest is just "filling in holes." Caveat #1: that hardware doesn't break out and improve at a faster rate than software for the next few decades. Caveat #2: it may not even be possible to quantify "the rate of improvement of software compared to hardware." You want to get me excited by some software? Show it to me but running orders of magnitude faster than everything before it could. All that matters at this point is better hardware because the software doesn't have much more room to radically change. I know that 'round these parts daring to ask "what's in the software startup kool-aid?" gets down votes. But I don't really care about becoming the biggest, most profitable ad-spammer in the world, nor video chat, nor overvalued and pointless web startups, nor browser animation recreating the state of the art from the 80's, nor the ability to play CD-ROM multimedia content, or Apps, or whatever you want to call them this decade. (This is the part where you get off my lawn.) The only thing that can prevent software from ending up in its own post-apocalyptic "Nuclear Winter" of suburban doom is a big bump up on the hardware: a) better batteries. b) more ram. c) faster CPU.