I always see everything from national laws of various stripes to human apathy blamed for the slow decline of general purpose computing but I think the answer no

I always see everything from national laws of various stripes to human apathy blamed for the slow decline of general purpose computing but I think the answer no one wants to admit is that the dream simply hinged on figuring out how to overcome certain practical hurdles that we have failed to cleae. There's all sorts of fingers that could be pointed in different directions across different industries of course (some being the same industry now due to consolidation of the stack) but the most fundamental failure of judgement in my opinion was that there was a romantic notion once upon a time that computers would be this great equalizer that could even allow clever enough eggheads to take on the world (literally, not with some fancy high value business idea) while simultaneously bringing real opportunity and equality to the common man ('anyone who can use a computer will be more valuable than a CEO'). The former idea never quite managed to explain why these eggeads wouldn't be beholden to the limitations of the hardware at their disposal (Turns out computing hardware multiplies the effectiveness of the boogey men just as readily as it does the eggheads and the boogeymen do a lot more hiring). The latter notion was abandoned by the same people who dreamed it up in the first place not that they'll admit it (of course they wanted computing to empower the common man, it's surely a coincidence that every step of the way they focused on expanding only an egghead's ability to command computers with wider accessibility being an afterthought motivated primarily by profit incentives) I think the ugly truth is that general purpose computing was more of a philisophical goal than a realistic one. It seems a lot more likely that from a technological perspective it's just a lot more efficient to have an expansive commons of innovative collaboration available for dueling giants to draw from on an as-needed basis.