Roughly every decade a cheaper class of computer forms around a new platform and use, displacing the last.
Bell counted mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, PCs, and then phones. Each new class was dismissed as a toy by the incumbent, which is what makes the pattern useful as a warning rather than a description.
In practice
- A mainframe vendor calls the minicomputer a hobbyist device; the minicomputer vendor says the same of the PC.
- An incumbent dismisses the cheap tablet as a toy for reading, and does not notice when it becomes the device most customers own.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- The curves, the limits and the laws of software