The point of Internet technology when it became public in the early 90s was to eventually provide all people with free or nearly-free information exchange and possibly telecom-type services. The economic growth of the 90s was such that corporations seemed beneficial (for the first time in history) and there was no reason not to accept good will from the information corporations (such as Google, and now FaceBook) as free software services. (Obviously, the services are not completely free as they include advertising, but some are such as Google Docs.)
Recently, there has been a rash of forced upgrades among these free-ish services that actually reduce the usability of the services. Gmail is an example, to be followed by Google Docs, and very soon FaceBook will force users to the Timeline format even though the majority has stuck w/ the list of "threaded" discussions that it began with.
I believe that this is "our" fault because nearly all the early web software was put into (versions of) the public domain for free use, and, at a certain point, we allowed proprietary corporations to replace volunteer managed free software with privately held free services. We asked for this when we allowed corporations to provide our free infrastructure; they control us because we comply as part of being "nice."
The problem has come to terms now that these forced upgrades are apparently pushing us backwards. I believe that corporate process of throwing all the talent on the street in favor of robot-like sycophants (esp from other countries w/ ancient oligarchies) that began in earnest a decade ago with the destruction of the North American information technology industry has assured that corporate developers would reach the limits of their ir "creative" and "technical" abilities sooner or later. It has been later, but it is now; there have been no significant benefits in half a decade and no epiphanies in a decade.
Around the middle of the last decade, I realized that the problem is not technical, but psychological. We had been relying on leadership that insisted on calling itself "hacks" when the entire human race views hacks as computer criminals -- the leadership would not change to adapt to this obvious perception problem. I know that means that the entire "free software" leadership suffers from what is called "concrete thinking," a serious personality defect with obvious symptoms. We followed lunatics, and we cannot extricate ourselves. If we succeed in replacing corporate free services w/ free software it will be as a solo effort, and of course that is not realistic nor even the point of free software.
I think a third problem is that we are not willing to deal with these problem people, not just in technology, but in everyday life.
