John Deere started commercially selling a self-driving tractor this year. That's a pretty big wow. Something straight out of the sci-fi books.

I think it doesn't pop because the internet has been streaming the development of such tech for the last decade or more. It seems incremental because we have had insights into the development process, which is something the masses didn't have access to when Windows 3.1 or the C64 landed.

Gone are the days of decades of behind the scenes R&D suddenly landing in our laps to amaze us. We now watch the R&D unfold in realtime.

But that also creates an inherent opportunity for open, 'hackable' versions of the broken, locked down crap. You can see this in much of the embedded ecosystem, where much stuff is unusably locked down simply out of short-term laziness and convenience but many of the most popular products are open.