I expected an article about 1990s browser wars. 2007-2008 is not ancient in my book.
A lot changed in the last ten years. It may not seem like it because most of those changes were refinements on things we already had at the time. We've just been in a long period of revisions. New programming tools, new social networks, new [insert thing we've had since the '90s]. The late '90s and first half of the '00s were full of radical changes, so it seems less significant in context.
We're probably on the brink of another radical upheaval like the '90s. There's lots of money flowing around, lots of amazing and well-refined tools, and all the low hanging fruit is more or less captured. No one's getting rich on "x as a service" anymore. People will have to really change something to capture the next huge payday, and the first few will set off a cascade of changed expectations.
I guess I can see this seeming reasonable in the early 1940s, but it was fully crazy even before Tim built this awful Heath Robinson hypertext system we're using, let alone this century. The Network is not like cars, or pants, it's not a passing fad that societies grow bored of, it's at the heart of what we are as people, it will outlive us all.
I remember trying to explain a lot of this stuff in the early 1990s when I was a teenager - to my parents and being bewildered by how little they understood what had already happened and what would inevitably happen next. It was really like I'm stood on a beach, there has been a distant rumble and the tide is going out very fast, and I'm saying "Inland. Mum, Dad, right now. Don't stop to pick up towels and stare at the horizon, we must hurry inland or we will drown" and they don't get it at all.
It has been like that C. S. Lewis quote - day by day, it felt like nothing big has changed, but looking back, everything is different.
[But mostly I just came here to practice using an em dash correctly…]
Or put in a different way, if the browser changes in 2007 are "ancient", how would you describe the ones that happened 10 years before that? Prehistoric? Jurassic?