Inanity at EmTech -- Web 2.0 and bad restaurants

The last time this type of issue was brought up, the conversation soon focused on 'are those companies overcapitalized.'

The question Lyons is asking is whether all of our ginormous geek brains are solving the "right" problems. Google, Facebook et al are hiring the best and brightest the US engineering schools have to offer, and put them to work on maximizing ad revenue, or - as Lyons puts it - finding better restaurants through social networks.

In the meantime, serious problems are going unaddressed and unsolved by the very same ginormous geek brains because we're too busy building sexy webapps to attract VC funding.

That's the crux of his argument. It's like watching Dodge or GM finding better places to put cup holders in their new huge SUVs or trucks while gas prices are doubling or even tripling. Sure, having a good cupholder in just the right place is a good problem to solve, and frankly that's exactly what I want when I'm looking for a place to put my Big Gulp. But my problem of paying $200 (or whatever) to fill up my car an hour later, surely, is a much more important problem to fix?

This is basically the message that Tim O'Reilly delivered at the Web 2.0 Keynote in the spring - we need to focus on the hard problems: http://tinyurl.com/6zahvu

That being said, the beauty of a democratic society is that everyone has a choice of how they want to use their ginormous geek brains, and the beauty of a free market society is that eventually the big problems will need big solutions and money will flow to those who come up with them.

There's also a bit of the same argument that the kids in my high school algebra class used to make to our math teacher. "Why do I need to learn this, when am I ever going to use it?" The answer is, you need to learn algebra, so you can learn calculus, so you can learn differential equations, so you can build a model that will predict the paths of hurricanes more accurately and potentially save millions of lives. The Web 2.0 building blocks we're creating today might lead to better global communication networks, which might enable scientists to better share information, which might lead to a critical breakthrough that helps to prevent millions of malaria deaths.

I do love this post, though. It's good to see Dan back in his old FSJ form.