The internet is subtly training you for a 'own nothing and be happy mindset' by giving you mountains of data / media without requiring the discipline, or skills, of curation.
For millennials (and beyond) there is no need to methodically keep track of a music cd, movie or have a personal library of media as spotify/youtube/netflix performs all these actions. The skills, or discipline, of carefully maintaining something, tracking it, curating it is lost as there is no need in an age where everything is seamlessly performed for you. There is no need to remember the minute details of media, events or speeches as search engines fill in the need to remember and cultivate a history.
The downside to this goes beyond the perpetual service economy in which the millennial owns nothing; but extends to the basic ability to maintain and service their possessions. To a large degree, this also impacts their ability to think and plan as the need to maintain a database, or library is merely another skill left along the wayside as the internet becomes more and more ingrained. The need to 'remember' is also greatly reduced as google fills in the gap and performs the spell check on words that aren't quite right.
In all, this creates a 'scattered slave existence' where no on remembers the occurrences beyond last week as they haven't developed the skills, or thinking practices to maintain long term discipline. The value off having a CD, or carefully curated collection is greatly diminished as it's lost in the sea off media that is easily accessible without any skillset.
notice how the basic function of a consumer PC went from running programs on your computer, to accessing things through a web browser (or an app that is basically a web browser tailored to browse one website). with modern computing, it literally does not matter if you have a mac, pc, or Android as long as it can run a modern web browser. the only thing left where the PC truly matters is either gaming or computationally intensive things like scientific simulations.
even in the case of gaming, they've been pushing for at least a decade now to make cloud gaming a thing.
Would you rather have it that in order to post that comment you would have had to buy a certain brand of computer?
Communication protocols have always been hardware neutral. Using BBSs on a dial up modem was not restricted to Amigas or whatever.
Imagine a world where "The Microsoft Network" became the dominant "online" space and you had to pay MS to access it.
Part of the phenomena you are describing is called commoditising your complement where you neutralise the USP of your indirect competition - cream producers want strawberries free so you afford more cream.
Software writers don't want software tied to a particular manufacturer, they want as many potential customers as possible.
you miss the point. communication protocol should always be free and hardware neutral.
It's the actual computing that has changed.
almost everything we do on our computers nowadays is computed somewhere else, or at least it has to get permission from somewhere else to compute on our own hardware.