In some sense, nothing has been really disruptive since the web browser. But that doesn't matter because what I'm talking about is reduced cost, reduced accidental complexity, reduced systemic latency.
Having lived through it, it's just loads easier to get something up and going these days. I ended up back in some Java code again recently, and servlets are a) a pain, and b) a general-purpose abstraction. They're adequate for a lot of things, but not particularly great at anything. Whereas these days people have had 15 years to come up with special-purpose code to accelerate all sorts of common activities. My point wasn't that AWS and Rails were the only good things that happened in 15 years. It's that those, which now seem old and boring, were near beginning of a whole wave of innovation aimed at making it easy to have a consumer-grade user experience up and running.
Having lived through it, it's just loads easier to get something up and going these days. I ended up back in some Java code again recently, and servlets are a) a pain, and b) a general-purpose abstraction. They're adequate for a lot of things, but not particularly great at anything. Whereas these days people have had 15 years to come up with special-purpose code to accelerate all sorts of common activities. My point wasn't that AWS and Rails were the only good things that happened in 15 years. It's that those, which now seem old and boring, were near beginning of a whole wave of innovation aimed at making it easy to have a consumer-grade user experience up and running.