While I hate to disagree with Stan, I do. I disagree with the premise that
merely "thinking of something" in general terms serves the purpose of
advancing science and technology. Its like the marketing credo, "I said it
therefore it is." There is a difference between being a visionary and just
having visions.

In my misspent youth, I knew plenty of inventors with visions. "Whoa man, so
like we should invent papers that don't snag, ya know. Thpt thpt thpt thpt
haahhh!" Those visions did not help the advance technology, society or the
Zig-Zag people.

In my misspent middle age, I saw a product demo. The product sold for a
minimum of 6 figures. After seeing the demo one of our programmers commented
to me that, we could have coded that product. My answer was to the effect
that we could have coded it but we never would have thought of it. The
developer was a visionary because he thought of it and was able to bring it
to fruition. It was a real product not vaporware. His vision benefited
himself, the user community and the world economy.

A more classical analogy might be that da Vinci was an inventor and Jules
Verne was a marketer. Da Vinci not only wrote of flying machines he actually
designed them. Verne wrote tales about technology but never contributed to
the body of knowledge.

We of the list are living through an episode of this nature. OpenMPE does
not yet exist as a real product. We have the visionaries to make it real. We
as a community did not just sit back with an idea, "Whoa man, OpenMPE sounds
like a cool idea. Someone oughta invent it."

We already had the "INVENT" people talking about their "visions" for MPE for
years. I hope that our world has not become so Dilbertesque that inventors,
developers and visionaries are only trying to keep up with the non-narcotic
induced pipe dreams of the kids in marketing. We vision not visions.

It is vision combined with know how that will ultimately bring a product to
fruition.

Work for Peace

The opinions expressed herein are my own and not necessarily those of my
employer.
Yosef Rosenblatt

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