The Next Great Platform Shift: Personal Agents

In the 1980s, the personal computer placed microprocessors onto desks, replacing mainframes with graphical desktops, where Microsoft built an empire by taxing the operating system. In the 1990s, the commercial web connected those machines through the browser, creating an open protocol layer where Netscape proved the market before Google established a tollbooth over human attention. By the late 2000s, smartphones and cloud datacenters turned computing into an ambient pocket utility, swapping keyboards for multitouch glass and moving economic power into closed mobile application stores.Each platform shift altered the fundamental interaction primitive: typing command-line syntax gave way to clicking graphical icons, which yielded to tapping capacitive glass touchscreens.Each transition also displaced the economic tollbooths of the preceding era. The open web made proprietary desktop software distribution secondary, turning operating systems into background plumbing for the browser.…