[hintymad]

> - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products.

I agree with the lesson too. Just to be precise, wouldn't the current model war be more akin to open-source office suite versus MS office suite? If so, then the cheaper option didn't really win. That said, the open-source alternatives didn't really feel the same as MS Office, and it took them a long time to reach the feature parity (or did they ever?). In contrast, the open-weights models are getting close enough to the SOTA models, and users can easily switch from one to another without feeling any difference for mojority of the tasks.

[geophile]

No, I don’t think so. PC + MS Office killed Wang custom hardware/software, for example. LibreOffice is much later, and can’t displace MS Office due to network effects. Cheaper won, cheapest can’t because of those effects.