Ask HN: What are the new ideas of the last 10 (or 5) years?

"Personal computers will be a big hit." "Internet search will be an extremely important and profitable business."

These statements were absolutely not trivially true at the time when personal computers started, or when Google started.

Can we collect important statements, which were not trivial 10 years ago, but seems to be fairly trivial now? (Regarding topics in which HN can be interested: mostly innovations.) A more interesting, but harder question: what happens if we take 5 years instead of 10? (Can we see clearly enough in this case? In what time-granularities can we think? What is the pace of development?)

Most software will eventually be accessed from a browser.

People will pay $15 a month in perpetuity for a single video game.

Talking to someone about your finances will be the exception, not the rule. All of your routine transactions are automated. So are many of the non-routine ones, such as opening a new account for anything smaller than a mortgage -- and we'll automate most of that, too. You'll laugh in the general direction of what people used to pay for money management, unless you're very rich or very poor.

It used to take effort to find out where you were going. It now takes effort to not know where you are.

They already are for a lot of people. Go further. They will be your primary computing, gaming, banking, music, GPS/maps, device. There are so many opportunities in mobile that it's almost silly to be working on anything else (and yet, I am working on something else).

Isn't this already done? I haven't visited or talked to anyone at a bank (other than a couple of calls to the help desk for my online banking when strange things happen) for years. Paying bills, transferring money, applying for loans smaller than a mortgage, opening and closing accounts, managing my investments. All that is trivially done on-line these days. I don't know anybody who doesn't do all their personal financial management over the internet.