For me the biggest aspect of the shift is simply that web and mobile apps became the larger standard to follow, with a higher effective install base.
In the 80s and 90s there was definitely interest in consumer software, but the applications often struggled to be useful precisely because information was bottled up on the local machine, and so you had to think in terms of publishing to analog, which in turn made everything consolidate around the few apps that did those things at a professional level.
Once you got into web based experiences the possibilities for consumers skyrocketed since the information transmission could go "all-digital" - you could post on forums, write a blog, buy and sell goods, publish video and so forth. And by doing it web-first you were writing to a standard with broad implementation.
After the rise of the smartphone the picture has shifted again towards experiences that are consumer internet focused, but using the device that most people have, versus the one that has the most power. There are video editing apps on mobile now, and they're actually reasonably powerful, if not quite appropriate for pro work. Drawing and writing is likewise very accessible on mobile with the small investments of a capacitive pen or keyboard. There's a definite sense of never having to leave mobile if you stay completely in the zone of working with standardized apps to publish online.
The desktop itself has been increasingly ceded to open source projects, for better or for worse. The biggest applications of yesteryear have competition, albeit often still far behind in certain categories. The smaller niche ones often get absorbed into a library and therefore are something you can script to taste if you have a little bit of programming knowledge - much like how microcomputer BASICs worked back in the day, just with more package management cruft.
And if you go in this latter direction for your work, then you aren't writing to a standard, you're writing for a user of one and wholly defining your "information life" on your own terms - and therefore you don't need too much in the way of cross-platform compatibility goop or integration polish, and can probably build off of a terminal, browser window or game engine to provide the UI.
In the 80s and 90s there was definitely interest in consumer software, but the applications often struggled to be useful precisely because information was bottled up on the local machine, and so you had to think in terms of publishing to analog, which in turn made everything consolidate around the few apps that did those things at a professional level.
Once you got into web based experiences the possibilities for consumers skyrocketed since the information transmission could go "all-digital" - you could post on forums, write a blog, buy and sell goods, publish video and so forth. And by doing it web-first you were writing to a standard with broad implementation.
After the rise of the smartphone the picture has shifted again towards experiences that are consumer internet focused, but using the device that most people have, versus the one that has the most power. There are video editing apps on mobile now, and they're actually reasonably powerful, if not quite appropriate for pro work. Drawing and writing is likewise very accessible on mobile with the small investments of a capacitive pen or keyboard. There's a definite sense of never having to leave mobile if you stay completely in the zone of working with standardized apps to publish online.
The desktop itself has been increasingly ceded to open source projects, for better or for worse. The biggest applications of yesteryear have competition, albeit often still far behind in certain categories. The smaller niche ones often get absorbed into a library and therefore are something you can script to taste if you have a little bit of programming knowledge - much like how microcomputer BASICs worked back in the day, just with more package management cruft.
And if you go in this latter direction for your work, then you aren't writing to a standard, you're writing for a user of one and wholly defining your "information life" on your own terms - and therefore you don't need too much in the way of cross-platform compatibility goop or integration polish, and can probably build off of a terminal, browser window or game engine to provide the UI.