[pjlegato]

"Products targeted to non-experts" bears emphasizing: prior to the early 2000s, "using computers" (for any purpose) was a very niche activity, not a mainstream thing that everyone did all the time every day.

Either you were a highly trained professional using a computer for serious work, or else you were a dedicated hobbyist. Either way, you expected to put in significant time to learn and understand how this magically complex machine worked before you could actually accomplish anything. "Normal people" without strong motivation to study the computer simply did not use computers much during that era.

Fast forward to the smartphone era, and "using computers" has become a casual everyday activity for normal people. Companies are now incentivized to produce software for a mass audience with UIs that require as close to zero thought, study, or technical skill as possible.

All the computer nerds were shocked when Google came out with just a single bare text input as its primary UI. Surely we needed the Baroque masterpiece that was AltaVista's UI to ever gain useful work from a search engine; there are so many parameters the user might wish to vary! But no; as it turns out, the new Eternal September mass computer user audience strongly prefers slightly less control in favor of less time spent thinking.

[JohnFen]

> All the computer nerds were shocked when Google came out with just a single bare text input as its primary UI.

Yes, if by "shocked" you meant "delighted". Not just that it was a single text input, but that it could also do the desired task better.

[izacus]

I think you're off by a decade there, in the early 2000s computers at home and in any kind of white collar (and many blue collar) professions were normal and common.