Best days of software development seem to be behind us? I’m really not sure what that means or why someone would say it, other than typical nostalgia.
Sure, today's software capabilities are much more advanced, but you no longer get a physical disk that you can load on you computer and be confident it'll just keep working for years on end without any external dependencies etc.
So maybe it isn't fair to say the user for a bad deal.
Imagine a pre-SaaS Google: You get a few of LTO tapes delivered to your doorstep. They include an index of every website in existence, it's owner/creator, a short description of what it is, and a number of semantic flags.
Moreover, you'd probably get a list of all identified businesses there are in every country, region and industry with their contact information and website addresses.
Imagine what you could do with that...
That's interesting. Can you share more about this ?
As for your pre-sass search engine idea:it's great. Very useful indeed.
But how do I get from that , to finding the bunch of separate webpages that describe how to solve my personal, niche problem( in a really good way ? Most problems are like that. Context is always different.
And yes Google is far from ideal. And SEO sucks.
But still, that problem solving capability is now available to many.