The value of outside-in technologies is often unclear before their invention—and may remain so for many years afterward. The web started out half-baked when Tim Berners-Lee concocted it at a Swiss physics lab in 1989, but it grew exponentially as it attracted developers and entrepreneurs who saw its potential. As my technologist friend Sep Kamvar jokes, if you asked people at that time what they needed to make their life better, they likely wouldn’t have said a decentralized network of information nodes that are linked using hypertext. And yet, in retrospect, that’s exactly what they needed.
Dixon, Chris. Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet (pp. 53-54). (Function). Kindle Edition.
