Partly ad tech. It changed the reward profile away from inventing cool new stuff towards lowest-common-denominator monetisation. The real change was the change

Partly ad tech. It changed the reward profile away from inventing cool new stuff towards lowest-common-denominator monetisation. The real change was the change in the culture of computer use from original creation to consumption and distribution of certain limited kinds of creation - which are mostly imitative, nostalgic, and either backwards- or (at best) sideways-looking rather than genuinely original. Real invention is now actively disfavoured. Google did a fair amount in the 00s but has slowly abandoned most of it, Amazon does a bit of blue sky but is mostly focussed on consumerism, Musk's idea of blue sky is straight out of a 1950s Tom Swift novel, and Facebook and Twitter are both hopeless. Netflix is cable TV done right - finally. But it's still cable TV. There are some exceptions at Apple, which still has a kind of legacy tradition of doing cool new stuff (see also, M1) but even that is a mix of invention for the sake of it and strategic lock-in as a goal. The result is a landscape full of development geared to comfortable suburban consumerism and associated corporate bureaucracy. There's very little interest in game changing technical development for the sake of it - which was more or less what NeXT was about. And there's even less interest in computing as subversion and empowerment, which was - believe it or not - a big interest in the 70s. FOSS doesn't change this. (It likes to believe it does, but practically it really doesn't.) Quantum computing and AI may be on the cusp - but even if they do something interesting they're going to be coopted by ad tech as soon as the paint dries. So it's not about technical scope so much as imagination failure. The real loss is the loss of imagination - something that tech and media have both done a lot of damage to over the last couple of decades.