From 2000 to 2010 we progressed from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.
That said in other areas there's much more improvement, for example EVs, solar panels, intelligent search engines. Remember the days when we used scripts that would parallelize searches over lycos, yahoo, webcrawler, altavista, alltheweb, ...
Just as the application space has begun to stagnant, suddenly our data is speaking back to us through LLMs. Such models will be the next space we'll 'optimize', but these models will also be optimizing themselves. Strange loop.
I would argue these are all worse outcomes than I'd hoped for.
I dreamed we'd have utilities based on RDF and bittorrent that could pull down any data we liked. Track any authors across the internet, highlight all content about topics we liked, pull in all new astronomy photos. Automatic ranking and scoring to fit our preferences. Better collaboration, much higher signal, much less noise.
I thought we'd control the data, the pipes, the routing, all of it.
We have a product manager internet, not a magical utility knife internet.