Apps Are Dead, Long Live AI Apps ⭐

I was lucky enough to grow up at the dawn of the personal computing revolution and I experienced the first home computers in the late 1970s and 1980s as each was released in turn. Those were heady times. I was young and captivated by this technology, and I dreamed about what I might do with my own computer.

Today, personal computing is common, and thanks to the rise of smartphones, especially, this thing that was once futuristic and even a curiosity seems almost old-fashioned. But back then, it was different. There was no formal market for computers or the software they could run. There were competing platforms from many companies, each mostly incompatible with the others, and it wasn't clear which, if any, would succeed. And so the first home computer users were largely on their own.

This wasn't a problem for the enthusiasts like myself who immediately gravitated to these computers before there was much if any good software to use. We could simply experiment with the BASIC that came with each computer and write our own apps. I embraced this immediately, and my first two computers, the Entertainment Computer System (ECS) add-on for Intellivision and the Commodore 64, both had a strong emphasis on graphics and sound. And so doing things like making a balloon sprite move across the screen above text, an example provided in the Commodore 64 user guide, was a nice peek at the possibilities. Which, at the time, seemed endless.

Not surprisingly, businesses sprung up to supply software of varying quality levels as well, many started by enthusiasts who were older than I was at the time. And as the market for home computers shifted to what we now call personal computers, or PCs, that software got ever more professional and useful. The market for enthusiasts who wanted to create their own software saw a brief resurgence with tools like HyperCard on the Mac and Visual Basic on the PC. But by the mid-to-late 1990s, that era was officially over. PCs and the software that ran on them had become quite sophisticated.

Given my old-school credentials, I would sometimes fret that those growing up in the 1990s and 2000s didn't have that DIY grounding. But this evolution is both natural and inevitable. Just as car owners no longer needed to be mechanics or understand how manual shift transmissions worked over time as that market matured, PC owners no longer needed to understand why or how software worked. These things were tools that they could use. And they did.

Well, at least in first-world countries they did. PCs aren't just sophisticated, they're expensive. And as third- and second-world countries evolved, their citizens interacted with technology in ways that were quite different from what I would have considered normal. Likewise, reliance on connectivity was often problematic in these places, and that impacted their relationship with technology.

These trends continue to this day, but over the past 10 to 20 years, technology companies have...