I once worked on a document management/project management system, the devs were first port of call for the client IT teams.
Boring, right? Non-game changing?
One phone call I got just after it was installed at a 15-20 person business. I'd helped them out with something and asked how the roll-out was going:
Client: "Yeah, it's great, we're loving it. Bit of a problem though..."
Me: "Oh right, well maybe I can help you out, what is it?"
Client: "We don't know what to do with Sue and Bill now, they don't have any work to do. What can we get them doing?"
This boring, non-game changing software had automated roughly 10% of their workforce. Obviously not great for Sue and Bill, but when you put it in those terms the cost savings across all the clients we were serving must have been 10s of millions of pounds. That's millions of pounds to be spent on actually building things instead of just faffing around with admin stuff making sure the subcontractors got the right diagram, or finding out what the site foreman's phone number was.
Even the silliest auto-tweet tagging software means you can do more with less, that's why people buy them.
Almost all software is game changing. Never doubt we are all changing the world. It's just that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. What Google did back in the 90s is almost laughably simple to what most of us do today. But obviously what they do now is much more complex.
No sarcasm, I think it's true. I'm talking about the original search engine, not what they've done to it since. They've done amazing things to it since and it's obviously turned into an arms race, but we all build much more complex software today than we did 20 years ago.
Better tools, better practices, better understanding of what works and what doesn't, better resources online.
Even simple things like most people these days understand how HTTP actually works, back then you'd be lucky to find people who even understood basic HTML.
Did you use Google back then? It wasn't actually that great, you might have to do a bunch of searches, try excluding words, just to get some vaguely good results. It was a lot better than the rest though.
a good and fast search algorithm for a massive database across dozens of machines isnt a trivial thing even today if you build it from scratch. In the 90ies their algorithms were world class!
Google's results were orders of magnitude better, in my opinion. I don't remember how it compares to today, frankly, but I remember the tears of joy I shed at the time.
I think I switched from using a combination of altavista & one of the search sites that combined a lot of different results.
It was better, but I can't remember thinking it wasn't orders of magnitude better. I didn't use it once and think 'oh my god, this is perfect'. It was a gradual switch. And to begin with the thing which made me use it more was the simple UI.
Really, it wasn't that much better, at least not to me at the time. I'd switch search engines every few months, or more accurately have 3 or 4 search engines to deploy against difficult queries.
Google was _slightly_ better than alltheweb.com at the time that I added it into the mix. But it slowly began to win more and more of the "query requires using 4 search engines" contests and eventually I only used one.
I don't want this to sound like an anti-corporation rant, but I think that most automated workers have a hard time moving across fields and that the money "saved" is often not benefiting the company but the owners of the said company. While paying people to fool around is certainly not right either, automation of the working class widens the income disparity gap
Ah, yes, maximizing profit for the owners at the expense of laborers. This has never happened before. I'll argue that the money saved could also be used to fund further automation of the labor that is one of their largest annual expenses.
Typically when people espouse the want to "change the world" it is for the betterment of humanity; though it is interesting that you identify with the sentiment.
It depends on what you mean by changing the world. For instance. The MS team working on Microsoft word upgrades doesn't change the world in a meaningful way, when was the last time you heard "Now MS Word has feature X, my life is saved, my children are healthier."
Meanwhile, I know two brothers who from a simple YouTube channel (not even devs) whose followers have topped the Kiva loan program, raised millions and millions of dollars for charities around the world, are actively educating people of all ages about history, literature, current events and science. One of the brothers has made the New York Best Sellers List in young adult fiction with a book about the struggles of cancer. With less capital they are decreasing world suck more than MS Word development team.
So, what about apps and web apps? A really cool childrens book that is interactive and encourages kids to read or learn about a cool and important topic, I would argue, will have greater net value than Angry Birds even if the audience is smaller. An app designed for companies (like electric companies) to use, that forecasts weather conditions that aren't storm conditions but are more severe than the company can operate saves lives, while the market is small. I'd argue saving even one life or helping teach one child how to read is changing the world in a big way.
I think what we do in development is cool and all, and most importantly profitable, but I don't know if it changes the world much.
Google changed the world. Lotus 1-2-3 changed the world. DOS and Linux changed the world.
But any new application? I think we're just offering luxury items. I don't see anything wrong with that (see "profitability" above).