If this becomes a business case to bring back something closer to real journalism, it is a good day. The NSA/prism story is really well-suited to this format. Connect the Guardian interview to administration concessions to POTUS conference. Would have been more valuable to the public than the soap-opera story that developed around Snowden's asylum seeking.
The other part is big companies are likely pursuing sustaining or incremental improvements that are perhaps perceived as key to beating out well known incumbents. Startups are likely (read hopefully) pursuing disruptive improvements and might expect incumbents to make classic Innovator's Dilemma errors in assessing risk.
I heard CDixon on PandoMonthly say his key founder questions would surround 'what's your secret?' I think his post provides more context to that line of questioning.
I agree with your assessment. There was a New Yorker article last week on an unrelated topic (Slow Ideas) that came to a similar conclusion about inherent inefficiencies in our market system:
"This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere."
The article continues in a health-care context to discuss the importance of doing-things-that-don't-scale efforts to educate and change behavior. I anticipate the connection here would be some utility-by-utility effort to subscribe to best practice. I worry the opposite will occur.
I wonder if there's a pool of non-profit capital available for purchasing technology meant to foster civic technologies. I'd worry that selling to governments would be too difficult for a startup otherwise. Length, contracting requirements, regulation, etc.
There certainly should be, joeg8. I know of, at least one grid computing infrastructure fund for this (can't remember the name though), and I believe Amazon must be offering discounted stuff AWS credit for non-profits, apart from Google's packages for non-profits.
If this becomes a business case to bring back something closer to real journalism, it is a good day. The NSA/prism story is really well-suited to this format. Connect the Guardian interview to administration concessions to POTUS conference. Would have been more valuable to the public than the soap-opera story that developed around Snowden's asylum seeking.