Hate to break it to you but it wasn't ever considered outrageous by anyone except a tiny minority of extremely loud geeks who knew how to use the right forums a

Hate to break it to you but it wasn't ever considered outrageous by anyone except a tiny minority of extremely loud geeks who knew how to use the right forums and right rhetoric to have disproportionate impact on other fellow geeks. The 90s-early 2000s were the era where the internet exploded and the dev community decided en-masse to start shipping software as web apps. Web apps are notable for giving massive streams of 'telemetry' to the web server operators as a natural consequence of how they work. Nobody cared and the change was embraced because the value of those server logs was so high that web-based SaaS companies could easily outcompete people steeped in client-side "your mouse clicks are private" culture. Eventually, web culture had to be forced on the desktop people. At Google they were distributing desktop apps and the command came from the very top (Larry Page) that Google's software updates should work just like the web. Silent, background, no end user control, no confirmation popups. Stuff just updates. Of course, huge uproar. End users should be in control of their computer etc. Nothing worked like that at the time. Page insisted: do it or you're fired, so it got done. Users loved it, that model turned out to be extremely successful and became a key competitive advantage for Chrome when it launched, one that others have since copied. The Overton Window shifted because the window only existed at all in programming culture. It took confident and in-control CEOs like Page and Jobs to kick developers out of their ideological cubby-hole and into a place that better suited the huge majority of end users, who really couldn't care less if some guy they never met knows how many seconds they spent looking at the welcome screen. But they do care a lot about whether their tech actually works reliably.