Barrier to entry makes all the difference. You are not going to see a 20 year old Woz or a Torvalds today build an NLP system of any serious utility. They just

Barrier to entry makes all the difference. You are not going to see a 20 year old Woz or a Torvalds today build an NLP system of any serious utility. They just do not have access to the kind of infrastructure required to do it. So comparisons to OS evolution, MS etc are moot. You need data, clean data and massive amounts of it to do accurate natural language processing. Very few org's have the data required to pull it off. And that can be seen in the limitations of Siri, WolframAlpha and IBM's Watson. The human brain takes a decade or more of processing all kinds of data, to build up a language model good enough to have a productive conversation. So even if these companies come up with the better learning algorithms, required to build up a decent language model, the bottle neck will always be access to quality data. Google has the data, but since they are off busy defending their advertising empire, innovation in search and therefore NLP has taken a backseat. For the paradigm shift in NLP to happen, things like Siri, Watson and WolframAlpha would need access to Google scale/quality data. Google can spur things along by building a marketplace around search so people can access the data.