What 40 Years of Computing Has Taught Us
And How It Shapes ServiceVision
We've watched technology transform for four decades. Not as passive observers, but as practitioners who've guided enterprises through every major shift. Each era taught us the same lesson: one becomes many.
The Pattern: From Singular to Universal
1984: The Personal Computer Revolution
The mainframe era gave us one application per organization. Computing was centralized, controlled, rationed.
Then came the PC. Suddenly, one device could run many applications. Word processing. Spreadsheets. Databases. Graphics. What took a room-sized machine and a team of operators became something on your desk.
The lesson: When technology becomes personal, adoption explodes. The enterprises that thrived weren't the ones who bought the most PCs—they were the ones who reimagined their workflows around distributed capability.
1995: The Web Connects Everything
Amazon started selling books. Just books.
Within years, they sold everything. The web took one item and made it every item. More importantly, it took one customer and gave them access to every merchant.
The lesson: Connection creates markets. The enterprises that thrived weren't just the ones who built websites—they were the ones who understood that being connected meant being comparable. Quality and service became visible, measurable, reviewable.
2007: Apps Multiply Function
The iPhone launched with one function that mattered: phone calls, plus a few apps.
The App Store changed that overnight. One device now runs thousands of apps. Each app does one thing well. Your phone became a camera, a GPS, a wallet, a health tracker, a remote control, a musical instrument, a level, a flashlight—and yes, still a phone.
The lesson: Specialization wins when switching is free. The enterprises that thrived weren't the ones who built everything into one app—they were the ones who did one thing exceptionally and integrated seamlessly with everything else.
2010: Cloud Becomes the Computer
Cloud computing started as storage. Backup your files. Access them anywhere.
Then compute moved to the cloud. Then databases. Then networking. Then AI training. Today, entire enterprises run without owning a single server. Storage became everything.
The lesson: Ownership is overhead. The enterprises that thrived weren't the ones who built the biggest data centers—they were the ones who moved fastest because they didn't have to build anything before they could start.
2026: AI Does It All
ChatGPT launched as a chatbot. One service. Ask questions, get answers.
Now look: AI generates code, writes documents, analyzes data, creates images, processes audio, translates languages, and manages other AI agents. The transformer architecture that powers large language models isn't just answering questions—it's doing work.
The lesson we're living right now: The interface dissolves. There's no more "Microsoft Word for words and Excel for spreadsheets." There's just your goal and AI that orchestrates whatever's needed to achieve it.
What This Means for Your Enterprise
Every transition followed the same pattern:
- New technology appears doing one thing
- It rapidly expands to do many things
- Enterprises that adapt early gain compounding advantages
- Those who wait face exponentially harder transformations
We're in stage 2 of the AI transition. ChatGPT did one thing. Now AI agents are multiplying, specializing, and integrating. The organizations that will thrive aren't the ones asking "should we use AI?"—that question is already obsolete.
The question is: How do we reshape our workflows, our teams, and our products around AI capability?
Why ServiceVision Exists
We've guided enterprises through every one of these transitions. We've seen what works:
Start with process, not technology. The best PC implementations didn't start with "let's buy computers." They started with "what work could be transformed?"
Integrate before you innovate. The web winners connected existing systems before building new ones. AI works the same way.
Build for the next transition, not the current one. Every technology we implement today should assume that AI will be fundamentally more capable in 12 months.
Human judgment stays in the loop. Every era produced automation anxiety. Every era proved that human insight, creativity, and judgment became more valuable, not less—when combined with new tools.
The Forty-Year Truth
Computing doesn't replace human capability. It multiplies it.
The mainframe multiplied calculation. The PC multiplied individual productivity. The web multiplied connection. Mobile multiplied accessibility. Cloud multiplied scale. AI multiplies everything.
The enterprises that thrive in 2026 and beyond aren't the ones with the most AI tools. They're the ones who understand what to multiply—and what should stay fundamentally human.
That's what 40 years of computing taught us. And that's why ServiceVision exists: to help enterprises multiply what matters.
Ready to multiply your enterprise capabilities? Let's talk.