Growth in the PC market and internet usage had a substantial bottom-up component. The PC, even without connectivity, was useful for word processing, games, etc. Families stretched their budgets to buy one in the 80's and 90's.
The internet famously doubled in connectivity every 100 days during its expansion era. Its usefulness was blindingly obvious - there was no need for management to send out emails warning that they were monitoring internet usage, and you'd better make sure that you were using it enough. Can you imagine!
We are at a remarkable point in tech. The least-informed people in an organization (execs) are pushing a technology onto their organizations. A jaw-droppingly enormous amount of capital is being deployed in essentially a "pushing on a rope" scenario.
And sometimes it disappears entirely for a while because either culturally, the world isn't ready for it/to adapt to it, or it wasn't delivered in the right form.
Google Glass comes to mind, which died 11 years ago and XR is only just now starting to resurface.
Tablets also come to mind, pre-iPad, they more or less failed to achieve any meaningful adoption, and again sort of disappeared for a while until Apple released the iPad.
Then you have Segway as an example of innovation failure which never really returned in the same form like the others, and instead now we have e-scooters and e-bikes which fit better into existing infrastructure and cultural attitudes.
It's quite possible LLMs are just like those other examples, and the current form is not the going to be the successful form the technology takes.
An even more recent example is the Metaverse. Something that has a similar pattern of being pushed top-down onto employees. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg decreed[1] that employees must spend part of their time in Horizon Worlds?
