several years (at least) back. Ridiculous that share values and net worth of some of these individuals is thru the roof, yeah, sure, at the time they came out w/ their innovations, such as Gate's PC platforms (vs. an IBM or other mainframe platform) was a showstopper and deserved the valuations then.

But it's time to move on and get into other technologies, etc., w/o the shadow of these looming giants overlooking them. Don't repeat of the errors that IBM made in the late 70s/early 1980s (arrogant beyond belief back then, the market was glad to move beyond IBM and their dictates, both hardware and software wise).

Once people are making money doing all the useful things they can, others will figure out OTHER ways to make money.

That will require them to create needs where they don't currently exist.

The Real Trouble With Silicon Valley. The toxicity of the web is peanuts compared with Big Tech’s failure to remake the physical world. Jan. Feb. 2020 issue.

How should we tell the story of the digital century, now two decades old? We could focus, as journalists tend to do, on the depredations of the connected life. As Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have devoured the online world, they have undermined traditional media, empowered propagandists, and widened America’s political divides. The smartphone, for all its wonder and utility, has also proved to be a narcotizing agent.

But what if, instead of focusing on Big Tech’s sins of commission, we paid equal attention to its sins of omission—the failures, the busts, the promises unfulfilled? The past year has offered several lurid examples. WeWork, the office-sharing company that claimed it would reinvent the workplace, imploded on the brink of a public offering. Uber, once seen as an unstoppable force that would transform urban transit as radically as the subway had, has likewise seen its public valuation plummet. From January to October, the two firms together lost $10 billion.
While these companies might seem like outliers, their struggles hold a message, not just for investors but for all of us. Big Tech continues to find new and profitable ways to sell ads and cloud space, but it has failed, often spectacularly, to remake the world of flesh and steel..



..On these counts, it has not delivered. To the contrary, the digital age has coincided with a slump in America’s economic dynamism. The tech sector’s innovations have made a handful of people quite rich, but it has failed to create enough middle-class jobs to offset the decline of the country’s manufacturing base, or to help solve the country’s most pressing problems: deteriorating infrastructure, climate change, low growth, rising economic inequality. Tech companies that operate in the physical world, such as Lyft and DoorDash, offer greater convenience, but they hardly represent the kind of transformation that Reagan and Gore had in mind. These failures—perhaps more than the toxicity of the web—underlie the meanness and radicalism of our era.

Decades from now, historians will likely look back on the beginning of the 21st century as a period when the smartest minds in the world’s richest country sank their talent, time, and capital into a narrow band of human endeavor—digital technology. Their efforts have given us frictionless access to media, information, consumer goods, and chauffeurs. But software has hardly remade the physical world. We were promised an industrial revolution. What we got was a revolution in consumer convenience.
..Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the wisdom of placing such a big bet on Silicon Valley delivering the United States from its rusting present to a glimmering future. Too much American ingenuity is chasing problems that simply don’t matter. The web was once celebrated as a democratizing force and a means of escaping institutional control.
>But Silicon Valley’s most profitable business model has been to construct expansive systems for tracking and manipulating human behavior: Together, Facebook and Google make almost 90 percent of their revenue by selling ads. As the big problems continue to go unsolved, tech’s advertising duopoly amounts to roughly $1.5 trillion in market capitalization...
READ MORE https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/wheres-my-flying-car/603025/
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-> Sacha Baron Cohen was right, social media giants need to stop facilitating hate & racism, regulation! (Nov. 22, '19).
https://www.adl.org/news/article/sacha-baron-cohens-keynote-address-at-adls-2019-never-is-now-summit-on-anti-semitism

- Sacha Baron Cohen's Keynote Address at ADL's 2019 Never Is Now Summit on Anti-Semitism and Hate -

- "The Silicon Six," all American, all billionaires, all concerned more about boosting their share price than protecting democracy!" ~ Sacha Baron Cohen, ADL Keynote Address, Nov. 22, 2019.

My money's always been on the 20th c., and the 19th-- so much was achieved, esp. for the middle class.

>If American productivity had continued to grow as it did from Harry Truman’s election to Richard Nixon’s resignation, the 2013 economy would have been about 60 percent larger. (Dividing those gains equally would have given the typical middle-class household a bonus of roughly $30,000 a year.) Instead, income growth from 1973 to 2013 was 80 percent slower.