On Invention and Corporate Maleficence - Mommy, Who Invented the Internet?

We labor under the assumption that the world is a constant, plodding march of invention, production, profit, rinse & repeat. But it is not. Inventors are a limited commodity. Really great inventors are a rarity and have only their limited life span in which to push society forward.

Unfortunately, inventors, like writers, are usually very poor and end up selling their ideas for bread to very, very large and greedy corporations. Corporations exist for one purpose: to increase their stock price. To do this, they are run by highly intelligent accountants and exceedingly oily-haired lawyers. Neither of these know what to do with inventions so the innovations sit on a shelf until some marketing research focus group says, "Yeah, we'd like that, thank you."

For example, the radio, television, computer, and the entire internet complete with eBay, Yahoo, Google and YouTube, were all invented by Mr. Simon Smegmastersonton, #21 Banton Row, Kingston in 1848. Mr. Smegmastersonton sold the rights to all the patents for £42.18s, no small sum in Victorian England, to pay off a few loans and buy Christmas gifts for his 14 children. They also enjoyed a lovely goose that year. Victorian England was just like that. Don't be so judgmental.

All of Mr. Smegmastersonton's inventions sat in a damp basement in Upper Clapton for years until someone else needed to buy Christmas gifts. They changed hands several times over the course of many Christmases this way. Finally, one by one, they came into the hands of large corporations who held large focus groups and decided, "Yes. Indeed there is a market for this," and so began the mass production of the product. Now, here is where the sticky part starts.

Take the radio. To make money with this little box, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), figured out if they created some sort of entertainment show, other corporation also trying to maximize their stock price would pay to advertise the products their focus groups told them were the next hot thing. Ironically, most of the products advertised in the early days of radio were biscuits, the recipes for which were all invented by Mrs. Smegmastersonton out of sheer desperation and near poverty.

To further exemplify how utterly, hopelessly uninventive corporations are, fast-forward a few years until NBC discovered television. The best they could come up with was to repeat the formula that worked with the radio. Fast-forward to the present day and we find the stupidity gene of the average NBC executive to be so fully cultivated that they are giving the Tonight Show back to Jay Leno. Fortunately, NBC can't figure out how to make money off the internet so they haven't screwed that up.