Remember that the original vision for the web was not made for companies, but for academic or government institutions. The idea was to have computers support u

Remember that the original vision for the web was not made for companies, but for academic or government institutions. The idea was to have computers support users, not customers. These words have become synonyms but they have quite different implications. The stated goal was to augment the human intellect, for which you need a well organized corpus of knowledge (think Wikipedia, whose spectacular growth and supporting community came from not being a commercial initiative). But nowadays the whole industry is focused around building products and services that can be packaged and sold, to the point that its professionals can't even think of any other possibilities when discussing the characteristics of the ecosystem. Incentives are completely different; it's no wonder that interests of industry are misaligned with actual needs of the final users.