I encourage you to actually work on a twenty year old piece of technology. It’s easy to forget that modern computers are doing a lot more. Sure, there’s waste. But the expectations from software these days are exponentially greater than what we used to ship.
I can stream almost any song I can conceive of in a matter of seconds from my phone. In doing so I can play it wirelessly across every speaker in my house simultaneously as well as on my TV. The lyrics will be displayed on that TV alongside animated cover art and I can control playback with my remote. I will have other similar music suggested to me automatically when that song is finished playing. Guests at my home can add music to the queue from their phones without any additional setup or intervention on my part.
You don’t have to want to do any of that yourself, but if you can’t concede that that sort of experience would have been utterly inconceivable in the days of Winamp—while being boringly commonplace today—I’m not sure we can have a productive discussion.
VLC has been able to stream to/from devices since ~2000. It has captioning support but I don't know if that applies to music. I guess WinAmp came out in ~1998 but it added support for shoutcast in ~1999. The size of computer needed to run winamp/stream shoutcast has shrunk I suppose. But anyways it was certainly conceivable as it was already a commercial product 25 years ago.
I've been a software developer for 25 years, so I'm already there. I really disagree with this though. When I look back at software I was developing 20 years ago in 2005 it is not particularly different than now. It's still client-server, based on web protocols, and uses primarily the same desktop UX. Mobile UX wasn't a thing yet but my whole point was that if we built more apps that were directly native with fewer abstraction layers they would perform better and be able to do more.
Can you give an example of an app that does exponentially more than the same or equivalent app from 2005?
