Ask HN: Did tech really revolutionize the world in the 2010s?

I will spend more time over the next few weeks and months thinking about it, but my first reaction is that the products and companies we most associate with “tech” today are still the ones that existed before 2010, like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, and Microsoft, but just at a bigger scale. And as far as “new tech companies” go, large “startups” like Uber and AirBnB were both stared before 2010 and again are really just larger versions of the same idea (e.g. no significant pivot).

Even things like cryptocurrency, namely Bitcoin, was birthed pre-2010.

It seems like a lot of the tech innovation of this decade revolve around enabling scale? And perhaps advances in Machine Learning/AI though I don’t think we’ve yet seen game changing AI quite yet.

The scale of things aren't a wow factor. Just compare the scale of something to 10 years ago and that to 20 years ago. The growth rate would have been the same.

"The Mobile Phone Generation by Fred Wilson

...

But maybe the most amazing thing, to me anyway, is that my mom has pretty much stopped using her land line phone. She tells everyone to call her on her mobile phone. For a generation that arrived on planet earth around the same time as the rotary telephone to be abandoning the landline phone in favor of a mobile phone is really something to see.

If you think about it, though, it makes all the sense in the world. As you find it harder to do things that you used to take for granted, having your own personal computer on you or near you, that allows you to talk to your friends and family, via audio or text, see what everyone is up to, and get someone to come pick you up and take you to Church, the doctor, the store, or anywhere else, is really incredibly useful. "

https://avc.com/2019/05/the-mobile-phone-generation/