Comment by dredmorbius
Comment by dredmorbius 2 days ago
Look up the AT&T "You Will" advertising campaign sometime. This ran beginning in 1993, and I remember seeing at least a few of the spots at the time.
What these ads (and much speculative fiction, say, Arthur C. Clark particularly the "newspads" (tablet computers) in 2001 and "minisecs" (smartphones) in Imperial Earth) portrayed was capabilities without consideration of commercial and market imperatives. Capabilities promised empowerment and enablement. Markets delivered enshitiffication and enclosures of commons.
And as Timothy B. Lee noted, "the ads were mostly wrong about one thing: the company that brought these technologies to the world was not AT&T". AT&T's networks deliver much of the content and messaging which was portrayed, but the services themselves are not rooted in AT&T, either the original firm or its remonopolised successor organisation.
<https://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6113853/we-live-in-the-future-a...>
Microsoft's vision was portrayed as well in the Bill Gates book The Road Ahead, published about the same time (1995). Again, it envisioned much, but little of that vision was delivered directly by Microsoft (though much of it was in fact experienced on computers running Microsoft's operating system, at least until the smartphone revolution supplanted it).