The field of ‘computers’ tends to hype things way before they are ready for prime-time. Way way before. For example, I remember lcd’s, wireless, parallel processing, etc. being discussed usually about 8 – 10 years before they were ready for the masses. If you don’t understand this, it is easy to get jaded or bitter about the field.
Another interesting aspect is that the bad designs, ‘usually’, get worked out of the system. It just takes a long time. For example, the whole industry goes crazy for ATM networking. Billions get wasted on this, but eventually it just goes away. The same thing happens with programming languages. Sun and Microsoft declare that Java and C# are ‘the only languages worth knowing’. Yet, most apps on Windows and the Mac are C++/Delphi and Objective-C respectively. Add to that the growing popularity of Python, Perl, Ruby, and PHP and you can easily see that, although it takes a while, the right ideas strive to come out eventually. If the past is any indication, expect some major changes in languages in the next 10 years.
So, enjoy the amazing computers we have now, but keep an eye on the future. If I’m right, displays, storage, networking, and processing power will continue to get better and better 🙂