| >does one dare imagine that a dozen or more others weren't damn close I think about this in the computer security industry, and my conclusion is that no, they were not. You do this in depth research on a niche topic. You submit it to an industry conference with 1000 attendees, 100 people attend your talk, 10 have the background understanding for it, and it is relevant to 1 other person's work. There is a surprisingly finite number of people working on certain problems. I am working on a hypervisor for binary instrumentation right now. It is because a single person streamed themselves building one over the course of a week. [1] How many other people watched the hours of video and were inspired to undertake such a project? I know of 1 other. The community is small, but let's extrapolate that to 5 people. I am not saying we are working on something so revolutionary, but on a rather niche problem, there are less than half a dozen people working on it. We also have other obligations in life like work, school, or personal relationships. So it is likely there will only be 1 or 2 applications fully realized. Could someone else do it? Absolutely, but very few are motivated on such a specific problem. They may have an interest in some other topic instead. 1. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSkhUfcCXvqHsOy2VUxuo... |