Too Much Suckage

The set of things that will change the world is not at all the same thing as the set of things that people will pay for. Linux has come a long way toward changing the world (especially on the server side), and it's free. People happily pay for the Wendy's Baconator and caramel Reese's Cups, but neither is on track to change the world.

Well, I agree that everything sucks, particularly the article, it had almost nothing to redeem it.<p>It not a new problem, thinking of new things is hard, trying to convince people to want new things is harder. I'm pretty sure there's a pg essay about it, it should be practically canonical my now.

Sturgeon's Law, baby. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law</a>

It is foolish to blame startups for this. Non-business consumers will not, with extremely rare exception, pay for anything online. There will always be another startup that will be willing to give your product away for free if it's successful. So what does suck? Consumers.<p>Also, the iphone doesn't really have much to do with the "web"...