Yeah, I think a lot of it are delusions of grandeur and fear that people will mock the ideas. Note--stackoverflow.com was very open all along, very successful, and as far as I know virtually no competition.
Interesting. The one missing piece--a RAD development environment that's as efficient as Visual Studio is at producing fat clients. The business world will only embrace the webcentric model when it becomes as efficient to code in as .net click-once fat clients. The idea of simple, cheap, rugged hardware is very appealing. But programmer time is the #1 cost--businesses go for easy drag/drop fat client apps. Software written for 5 users has to be thrown together pretty fast or it never pays back...