I'm going to repeat the comment I made on the website here. I think the history of technology is this. Grand visions that are publicly funded (Computers, The I

I'm going to repeat the comment I made on the website here. I think the history of technology is this. Grand visions that are publicly funded (Computers, The Internet, etc) have been since privatized and destroyed by the market. I don't think you should compare Smalltalk vs Linux, but Alan Kay's Desktop GUI and Dynabook to today's UIs and the iPad. It isn't a history of competing ideas that the market choose is correct. It is the history of grand ideas incubated in the public sector and then further distilled and misunderstood by the private sector. The reality is the Market has little in making the decision between the grand idea and the distilled one. Consumers never had the opportunity to decide. Consumers were always given worse ideas to choose from to begin with. Just like when you walk into a super market. You are given options that were decided for you. That were filtered through thousands of decisions made outside the market beforehand.