[opinali]

Virtually all big science/tech projects from early 20th century were state sponsored, so it was difficult for SF writers to imagine a future where important innovation might come from the private sector or emerge from large scale decentralized contributions. Frankly, this is still large true today if you consider that lots of modern stuff comes from tech companies that are becoming as rich and powerful as small nation states, so they can spare a few billions in basic research with long-term or uncertain ROI.

And to be fair with Asimov, he saw some of that for example with "U.S.Robotics", a fictitious private company that invented the positronic brain and had a monopoly on that business. Also, his Encyclopedia Galactica is the creation of a large group of "encyclopedists" who are basically academic elites, something we could see as a Wikipedia-like except that it wasn't produced by millions of joe schmoes but rather by a kind of priesthood of professional intellectuals. (Foundation makes these people work in a centralized organization, but that happens in a late period of the galactic empire, it's my impression that the origins of the Encyclopedia are way more descentralized.)

[ghaff]

Oh. I'm not faulting him. When he wrote his books, organizational models were dominated by strict hierarchies whether government or assembly line-type manufacturing companies. Even more collaborative academic research tended to be dominated by big corporate labs and elite research universities. The average person never interacted with mainframe computers directly and information flow was largely mass market broadcast.

Absent any existing examples, the effects brought about by the modern Internet, smartphones, collaborative open source software development, generally less rigid organizational hierarchies, etc. would have been very difficult to visualize. Indeed it would have seemed almost alien.