So, who's the new 'Google' now?
At the end of the day they have the money, and they do provide ridiculous perks.
Actually Netflix much more so, only their projects are not in software. Just sayin.
For instance, Amazon and Google became huge between 2000 and 2005. That was a stretch of time when great engineers were a dime a dozen. Tons of dot coms had cratered, and Sun Microsystems was circling the drain.
That created a huge pool of educated talent, eager to be hired.
That situation doesn't exist any longer.
The game done changed.
Another is with all systems taking the roles traditionnally filled with state actors ( registers of some sorts).
But you’re right, so far no « killer app » has been found. That’s what makes it interesting today, imho.
edit : to answer your question more precisely, a talk by one of hedera founder to a university class was eye opening to me ( here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjQkag6VOo0)
How long do we have to wait until the lack of a killer app stops being interesting, and simply means the technology is not useful?
How many of today's Internet giants were founded in 1998? Amazon. Plenty of defunct also-rans: Netscape, Ebay, Yahoo, AOL, Geocities, Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Pointcast, Monster.com, RealAudio, Pets.com, Kozmo, AllAdvantage.com, Webvan, DoubleClick. Netflix was in its infancy (~1 year old). Apple was a dying hardware company, a few months from bankruptcy and kept alive by Microsoft's cash infusion.
Google's official founding was several months in the future. PayPal was right around then. Napster was a year in the future. Friendster and LiveJournal were 4 years in the future, MySpace 5 years, Facebook almost 6. SomethingAwful.com, Bodybuilding.com, and Fark.com were a year in the future, 4chan 3 years, Digg 6 years, and Reddit 7. Twitter was 8 years in the future. YouTube was 7. Heroku and Weebly were 8-9 years in the future, which was the same time SquareSpace graduated to more than one employee. Dropbox was 8 years in the future. AirBnb was also 8 years, but didn't catch on for a further 5 years or so. Indeed was 6, Etsy was 7, Indiegogo was 9, Kickstarter was 11, GoFundMe was 11, Pinterest was 12, Patreon was 14.
So to answer your question going by the web's example - probably about 7 years. The "killer app" for the web (communication & coordination, IMHO) started becoming apparent to the mainstream around 2005, with Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Etsy, Indeed, and Twitter all being founded within +-1 year of that. Interestingly, analogues of all of them existed in 1998 (Classmates.com, DejaNews, RealVideo, EBay, Monster, and...well, nothing really for Twitter), but it took almost 20 years for the underlying infrastructure to get mature enough to get mass consumer adoption.
I don't know if you were on the Internet in 1998. I was. The Web was useful, mature, and had tens of millions of paying customers in 1998. In contrast, all the people I have known to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies only do it for speculation.
You bring up PayPal and list eBay as a "defunct also-ran." The only reason people started using PayPal was to shop on eBay, and the only way PayPal got anyone to start using them for payments was to bribe people with $20 referral bonuses, which they could only do due to their VC firehose of money, and a huge spambot campaign where they pestered eBay merchants with messages along the lines of "I'd like to bid, but I can only do PayPal." (see The PayPal Wars)
PayPal is a great historical lesson in explaining why BitCoin and other libertarian hash chain schemes will fail as a currency, because PayPal was founded on the same deluded libertarian fantasy:
"“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel predicted. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”"
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/who-killed-payp...
The real value of PayPal turned out to be fraud prevention and consumer protection, something that hash chain schemes lack by design.
I've been on the web since 1994. I certainly found it useful in 1998, but the things it was useful for included:
1.) Looking up Geocities pages for my favorite bands.
2.) Reading rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan.
3.) Playing DragonRealms, an early MMORPG.
4.) Instant-messaging my friends.
5.) Earning money through AllAdvantage.com. Think I made about $40 from them off referral fees.
6.) Looking up information for school papers.
7.) Amusing myself with the HampsterDance.
Streaming video existed but was far too slow and glitchy to be worth watching. Amazon.com existed, but my parents refused to buy anything online. My sister was an avid user of Kozmo.com when she went to college, but then they went bankrupt a year later. MapQuest existed, but took too long to load and still required that you print out directions, since you couldn't exactly bring a computer in the car.
By contrast, I've spent over $5K at about 2 dozen different AirBnBs in the last 5 years (and stayed at a hotel...erm, twice, maybe?). I just booked a haircut online, after reading the Yelp reviews and looking up the location on Google Maps. I spent 15 minutes typing up this comment on Hacker News, which I guess is the spiritual successor to Usenet. I don't own a TV, but I watch a bunch of YouTube and my wife's an avid Netflix user. We get almost all our packages delivered via Amazon.
In terms of how much the Internet changed behavior, a lot more happened in the 10 years between 1999-2009 than the 10 years between 1989-1999, and arguably even more happened between 2009-2018 than 1999-2009.
There are some very peculiar properties of a dlt, that makes them special.