[dominicdoty]

I think the counter to this would be that if you focused on the "listen to a song I want right away" problem - you would have invented Spotify. From a business perspective inventing Spotify is probably better than inventing bittorrent. Elegant solutions are lovely, but often miss the problem people wanted to solve. Sometimes a useful product is built on top of an elegant solution e.g. WireGuard vs Tailscale. Seems similar to academic research vs engineering. Both useful, different goals/outcomes.

[xg15]

I find the peer-to-peer example odd, because in the context of music sharing, p2p had a very simple, nontechnical purpose: Build something that no business would be interested in building, because they'd immediately be targeted by the MPAA and RIAA. P2P had the pretty clear-cut purposes to allow Napster to reach a massive scale without the technical infrastructure that would have been required for that (and could only have been provided by a company) and to make it immune from being taken down.

So the secondary purpose of P2P was bootstrapping, the primary was to evade the law.

Later, after the music industry learned their lesson, a business like Spotify could emerge that cooperated with content producers. Of course then they didn't need any exotic architecture anymore, because the primary reason for that architecture was gone.

[xyzzy123]

The cool part of Napster (and the value added by the p2p architecture) was that it let you decouple the problem of delivering songs on the computer from the much more difficult problem of having to license them.