[amirmc]

Improving people's lives can take many routes.

I do agree that "infrastructure can only be as useful as the applications they support" but I disagree strongly that "there isn't much point if it is just for our own edification". Advances are built on top of each other and some of them can seem obscure to the lay person. If no-one were pushing those boundaries we might not be in a position to discuss whether 'facetagram' is more impactful than 'instabook'. In that way, I'd argue that infrastructure is fundamentally more important due to it's multiplier effect (consider what EC2 has enabled).

I believe Marc Andreessan once said that Netscape wouldn't have been possible were it not for all the technology/infrastructure that went before it. He likened it to the icing/frosting on the cake. I can't seem to find the exact quote now though.