

Inanity at EmTech -- Web 2.0 and bad restaurants - jkkramer
http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2008/09/24/emtech-inanity/

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ATB
The last time this type of issue was brought up, the conversation soon focused
on 'are those companies overcapitalized.'

The question Lyons is asking is whether all of our ginormous geek brains are
solving the "right" problems. Google, Facebook et al are hiring the best and
brightest the US engineering schools have to offer, and put them to work on
maximizing ad revenue, or - as Lyons puts it - finding better restaurants
through social networks.

In the meantime, serious problems are going unaddressed and unsolved by the
very same ginormous geek brains because we're too busy building sexy webapps
to attract VC funding.

That's the crux of his argument. It's like watching Dodge or GM finding better
places to put cup holders in their new huge SUVs or trucks while gas prices
are doubling or even tripling. Sure, having a good cupholder in just the right
place is a good problem to solve, and frankly that's exactly what I want when
I'm looking for a place to put my Big Gulp. But my problem of paying $200 (or
whatever) to fill up my car an hour later, surely, is a much more important
problem to fix?

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kleneway
This is basically the message that Tim O'Reilly delivered at the Web 2.0
Keynote in the spring - we need to focus on the hard problems:
<http://tinyurl.com/6zahvu>

That being said, the beauty of a democratic society is that everyone has a
choice of how they want to use their ginormous geek brains, and the beauty of
a free market society is that eventually the big problems will need big
solutions and money will flow to those who come up with them.

There's also a bit of the same argument that the kids in my high school
algebra class used to make to our math teacher. "Why do I need to learn this,
when am I ever going to use it?" The answer is, you need to learn algebra, so
you can learn calculus, so you can learn differential equations, so you can
build a model that will predict the paths of hurricanes more accurately and
potentially save millions of lives. The Web 2.0 building blocks we're creating
today might lead to better global communication networks, which might enable
scientists to better share information, which might lead to a critical
breakthrough that helps to prevent millions of malaria deaths.

I do love this post, though. It's good to see Dan back in his old FSJ form.

