Now that you mention it, I think there's a real lack of grandmas in tech... maybe I shouldn't be saying this publicly, but we don't have any at our company.
I think it's a fair question - hardware companies have recalled and replaced dangerous components before.
I got a free replacement battery from Apple in the mid 2000's when they said that a batch of their batteries had a "small fire risk"...
If I'm being cynical, I guess it depends if their line is:
"the old battery is dangerous which is why we've changed the materials we use"
or
"we're changing the materials we use, and that has this interesting side effect that totally coincidentally fixes a dangerous issue with out old batteries"
Unrelated, but there was a time when I vastly preferred Microsoft Entourage and Microsoft Word on a Mac to the Windows versions. They both had features that their windows counterparts didn't for quite a while!
Then they unified the teams that made their products for the different platforms and we ended up with the ribbon toolbar UI, which was a pure example of "good looking UI over functionality". I remember using excel with the ribbon toolbar, and it was really easy to put a funky pattern on my bar charts, but annoyingly fiddly to extrapolate data - ie. to actually use excel for science...
It's got to be said that if it was my company I would still have unified the teams. I probably would have ok'd the ribbon toolbar too, as I imagine that if I was running Microsoft I probably wasn't doing a lot of data analysis myself and I wouldn't know any better.
These comments cover it pretty much, but also relevant was that it was quite rare for women to own land as it would often transfer to the family (ie. husband) on marriage (essentially, heiresses), or to male heirs on death (or only to only-child heiresses if they married).
Widowhood and un-eligable female only-children were one of the main ways women were able to be landowners way back when.
This is regarding England at some point in history - I'm unsure both when in history this stopped, and how similar this was to any other places in Europe or the rest of the world.
There's a column-statue on a hill in rural Wiltshire (England) of a widowed trader named Maud Heath who made a causeway for traders to get to and from their nearest market town. The details of the story vary depending on the source or people you talk to, but wikipedia has most common parts of the bare bones of the history there.
Then we're into the "AI" conversation, where I think the general public think we're a lot closer to AI than we really are... Just because we have 90% reliable speech recognition and it can convert that to a basic google request, and parse some likely results, does not make Siri/Alexa/etc "intelligent".
I think there's been a much bigger change in (particularly front end) web development over the last decade, and that's that the underlying technology is now a lot less experimental.
Wind back to 2010, and websockets was new and fun, webRTC was coming up, there were loads of interesting possibilities about how the web could be used, HTML5 was new/coming, compilers (sass, gulp, etc.) were perceived as a benefit as they took away from common repetitive tasks, KnockoutJS and Ember were trying new approaches (that eventually turned into Angular/React/Vue).
It felt like the possibilities were endless, and the future was ours for the taking.
Now, it feels like we (as the global web community) have entered a period of stability - all of the decisions have been made.
- Frameworks win (and broadly speaking, React, Angular and Vue are all very similar to use, give or take a bit).
- You need to write tests, because front end applications contain more behaviour (which used to belong to the backend)
- Build tools win for a host of reasons (babel allowing future JS features early, type checking, etc.). (As an aside - the logical conclusion of lots of nice build tools is... lots of nice build tools (and therefore boilerplate))
- Experimental technologies (webrtc and web sockets, among others) are "gimmicky" or "niche" - useful in small amounts
- Designs are all the same (hyperbolically speaking) - want a product page? give it a horizontal three-column layout showing a free tier and two pricing options. Use Bootstrap, or roll something out that approximates it.
For me, there used to be an excitement that there could be a new core frontend web technology every few months - that excitement doesn't exist now.
But... that doesn't mean that it's not fun to work in web development anymore. It is the people that have changed and become more limiting, not the technology and possibilities (which have only grown over the last 20 years). And by people, I mean you (you're not 14 anymore), me, clients, managers, users - everyone.