[paganel]

From half a world away the US tech industry has looked more "strangled" in the last 6-8 years compared to the 2005-2012 period (to give just an example), one could say that happened because of the concentration at the top (of talent and money, mostly, or of money keeping that talent in golden hand-cuffs).

During that 2005-2012 timeframe you had a US search engine becoming really global, a US online retailer almost single-handedly inventing a new industry (cloud computing) and a US social-web company crushing almost all foreign competition on its own home-turf (and which could only be stopped by explicit Government intervention, as was the case with China explicitly blocking FB and with Russia directly taking control of VKontakte as a better way to counter FB).

[antb123]

cloud computing was invented by shared mainframes in the 70s and 80s and charges per MIPS.

Amazon applied open source software to the hosting and specifically the network stack and security stack. The model was already there.

[oblio]

The model wasn't already there. Everyone means the public cloud. Mainframes were at best, private clouds.

[xxpor]

The key was VT-x/AMD-v becoming available.