alt Hacker NewsI've been preaching this for a while but the era of PC as in "personal computing" is coming to an end and will slowly but surely be replaced with CC, Corporate Computing, where the corporations own everything, the hardware, the software and only permit you to use their equipment against a monthly fee and only to the extent they allow and permit. Everything you do will be controlled and observed and extracted for data for extra revenue streams. (Ads)
Free/libre software is the only bastion of hope but I'm sure if it would ever become large enough to threat the CC revenue models it'd be locked down, amputated, bought out or silenced by any means necessary. For the time being the technical hurdles and low quality is what keep the majority away from it and gets the job done for the corporations.
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The PC as a growth segment was at an end, but that’s because Microsoft cornered the market.
It was good enough and they just needed to make security fixes and tweaks; and I still would have paid for it!
Yet, the leaders at Microsoft found a way to lose their marketshare.
tl;dr; it just needed to remain quiet, boring, but reliable to remain a cashcow.
So basically rented mainframes like IBM did in the '60s but with ads?
I agree about free software but that only works as long as the hardware doesn't get too closed down. At some point even reverse engineering won't keep up with it. We need more free/libre hardware.