

Why Veteran Visionaries Will Save the World - BioGeek
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/st_thompson

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gaius
You know, one of the points people like to make about the recent financial
crisis is about the financial services industry sucked into lots of talented
people who could/should otherwise have been doctors, scientists, teachers,
engineers and so on. But what about all the talented people who also could
have been but instead are working on _another_ cool-but-useless Web 2.0
startup? Isn't the social cost of that at least as high?

~~~
pg
A lot of things that seem cool but useless turn out later to be useful. Back
in 1995, a lot of people thought the web itself was cool but useless.

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gaius
Not really. The web was invented for a specific purpose: Gopher had proved
inadequate for scientists informally publishing papers and collaborating. Even
if consumers had never taken it up, it would still be being used by the
physics community for its original purpose.

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brlewis
When Tim Berners-Lee was traveling around pitching the WWW in 1991 he didn't
present it as a physics-only project, or even an academics-only project.

