Aldus PageMaker hit huge popularity with PageMaker 5.0 released in 1993. It really sparked the “Desktop Publishing” revolution, and the product lived on through two more major releases and eventually became Adobe InDesign. At the time, everyone expected that this new technology would result in some truly amazing locally-made newsletters, brochures, flyers, and even books to be produced, because now there was broad access to powerful layout and design tools.
Instead, everyone just became very very bad publishers.
The tool made it quick and easy to create something that was merely adequate. No matter how powerful the tool was, without the time put in to master the tool and fully explore the ideas behind the publication being produced, everything looked the same. Everyone used the same amateurish layouts, the same stock system fonts, and the same “make the margins smaller to fit more words on” work-arounds.
Perhaps the worst part, though, is that now that publishing was cheap and easy, the world set about publishing all kinds of things that just never needed to to be printed. Time-to-market was king, so we published everything, before it had been refined and before we even decided if it needed to be published - and HP sold a ton of inkjet ink.