Part of the actual answer is buried way down at the bottom, and has nothing to do with the (probably imaginary) Jobs agenda angle: > Either way, expect no Hype

Part of the actual answer is buried way down at the bottom, and has nothing to do with the (probably imaginary) Jobs agenda angle: > Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it. That's it, not some conscious agenda by Jobs. A Mac will let you run anything you want, so why has nobody else made something like Hypercard? Why isn't there one for Linux or Windows or as a SPA web app? Because of the second system effect and the general trend toward gratuitous unnecessary complexity at every level of the stack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect The other half of the answer is in my other reply. TL;DR: there are more programmers today than there were back then, but there are orders of magnitude more passive users who aren't "computer people" and just want a gadget that does a few specific things. Walled gardens primarily service the latter, and do it acceptably well from their perspective. For the former there's Linux, FreeBSD, and commercial "real computer" OSes like MacOS and Windows that will let you run whatever you want with the proper incantations.