Secure enclaves on phones went from a "no one wants this" to "I can't imagine not having this" over a multi year evolutionary period.

A weak gradient but a self-accelerating one.

Once it existed, it made sense to move sensitive workloads to it, which then made sense to improve the integrity of the boundary and the capabilities, which then pulled in more use cases...

Confidential computing isn't useful for today's mainstream cloud services and architectures.

"Of course Google can see my gmail data, how could they not?"

The current default service architecture presumes the service can see all of the data.

Confidential computing for end users is more about protecting an application's data from the host cloud... a more esoteric and less obvious need.

But confidential computing exists because various high-sensitivity workloads need that protection from the cloud host.

You can surf that motivating need for confidential computing to exist to enable something fundamentally new that isn't possible without it.

It's now possible to build a new type of user-facing, more private software because of confidential computing, even if that's not what it was originally built for and no users knew to ask for it.