I think it's fairly easy to explain, too. The march of the technology industry since at least 1920, if not earlier, is that capabilities that were expensive become cheap; if you look at what you can't afford today, chances are good that something with equivalent capabilities will be affordable in 10 years, and cheap in another 10. At the same time, we've entered a stage where the capabilities you can get for £100,000 just aren't impressive any more as compared to what you get for £1,000; in 1980, the difference between £100,000 of technology and £1,000 was obvious and significant. Nowadays, £100,000 just buys you more of what you can already do with £1,000 of technology - no new capabilities. Put the two together, and we enter an inflection point; we've come out of a period where there's loads of great stuff if only I could afford it, and into a period where we need imaginative innovation (here's a thing you can do that nobody thought of before), not just efficiency gains (here's a thing that would have needed an entire System 360 per person in 1960, only now it's affordable to the ordinary consumer), to get exciting technology.