The ability to reach is a problematic one; consider e.g. Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store in which you see literally thousands of new products appearing

The ability to reach is a problematic one; consider e.g. Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store in which you see literally thousands of new products appearing daily. Technical excellence is secondary and often neglected(see e.g. WhatsApp's security issues!) which results in poor quality software and poor progress. Simply the barrier of entry is much lower, which in turn reduces the programming talent. I'd be interested to see what the quality of software would be when average 65 yo granny would be reading API documentation of some "web app" because it's just so easy and it just works. :) I think the difference between "average programmer" 20 years ago and now is the fact that back 20 years ago you had nothing fancy. A text-based editor, command line and a compiler. You were perhaps able to set graphics mode with some obscure commands and get some pixels on the screen. And that was just so fascinating. You really had to me one-in-a-hundred kind of person to be proficient with that stuff. If you put an average programmer of 2012 to such situation, I really bet a huge percentage will just drop the hobby and do something else. Though, on the other hand, things were so simple back then. What does it take these days to have access to the screen pixels as an array? Libraries, frameworks, documentation, APIs and whatnot. Back then you just moved a value to CPU register and called a certain interrupt and voila, 320x200x256 graphics mode with framebuffer starting from a well-known address. Then it's just a matter of writing to memory addresses, very simple. Couldn't be any simpler really!