[Detrus]

It would be great to have a comparison of fluff to meaningful innovation today vs. decades ago. How many man hours were spent on silly military ventures? Manned surveillance satellites, nuclear artillery, boomer subs, ICBMs, MIRV, the Orion project etc. These particular projects led nowhere and had few useful side effects. It would be interesting to add up the man hours and compare it to the web economy.

Rhetoric is enjoyable to read, fun to write but in-depth analysis of our economic and technological progress is a hard problem.

As far as the web goes, more can be done on it even before we resort to poorly served enterprise/medicine/energy markets for new ideas. It's the same problem desktop software once had when that market was over-saturated with word processor or email client clones. It's only today that there are word processors with new features, like the no-distraction theme. That could have been done then, but there was a bad environment for new ideas.

Web people are chasing clone ideas because there's a bad environment for ideas again. There's too much feature overlap between various social network and communication tool attempts like conversate, qonversation, twitter, reddit, HN etc. Focus on execution over ideas might matter more for your personal success, but it's horrible for technological progress.

Also I don't expect the web culture of young hipsters and hackers getting excited about enterprise/medicine/energy. Such markets could be served indirectly, through some generic CMS/communication/portal/DB thing.