So if the web was originally intended to be a document/project management system, what would you end up with if you tried to invent an (improved) global system of interconnected computer networks?
Something that never gets built because the project scope is too ambitious and ambiguous...
The World Wide Web was preceded by Project Xanadu [1] which, despite a decade of significant investments from both research institutions and private companies like Autodesk, never reached a stable state where it could be actually used for something by people outside the project's inner circle. The WWW got there just a few years after it started.
Tech people often forget that for many global scale projects, the actual /technical/ problems to solve are only about 5% of the overall project. The political problems (political meaning conflicting interests of different parties involved) are much harder to solve.
Having studied both, I love tech because 1+1=2 always. I find politics much harder because --depending on the way you present a problem-- 1+1 maybe anything between 1 and 3, and sometimes even 20.
The World Wide Web was preceded by Project Xanadu [1] which, despite a decade of significant investments from both research institutions and private companies like Autodesk, never reached a stable state where it could be actually used for something by people outside the project's inner circle. The WWW got there just a few years after it started.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu