In this essay,The Death of a Retailer, Om Malik writes fondly about Fry’s and its inevitable passing. I agree strongly with the following:
In retrospect, as is often the case, Fry’s death was inevitable. In Fry’s heyday, many of us built our own computers (or at least tinkered with them). We bought software and installed it. The struggle of being a lover of computers was what made it so special. Every year, however, computers became less cumbersome.
Come to think about it, “the struggle” is what captured my imagination about computers and why I still tinker.