As Henry Ford would say, "They didn't want a car. They wanted a faster horse".
Often we go out exploring the solution space for new things that were never done before and nobody ever asked for them because nobody had imagined them until they saw the first one. Remember how blown away everyone was with the Jeff Han's multitouch demo? It became immediately obvious it was the future of direct manipulation interfaces.
If you go back further, do you remember how sci-fi pictured the computers we would be using "in the future"? In 2001 there were no alphanumeric keyboards. Neither on the Enterprise. We are finally catching up with the vision of Tron, of the computer as an environment for intelligent agents (it took decades for most people to even formulate this understanding of the movie). We get a lot of things wrong, but our job is to try the things nobody is asking for, because they don't know they can be.
As Henry Ford would say, "They didn't want a car. They wanted a faster horse".
Often we go out exploring the solution space for new things that were never done before and nobody ever asked for them because nobody had imagined them until they saw the first one. Remember how blown away everyone was with the Jeff Han's multitouch demo? It became immediately obvious it was the future of direct manipulation interfaces.
If you go back further, do you remember how sci-fi pictured the computers we would be using "in the future"? In 2001 there were no alphanumeric keyboards. Neither on the Enterprise. We are finally catching up with the vision of Tron, of the computer as an environment for intelligent agents (it took decades for most people to even formulate this understanding of the movie). We get a lot of things wrong, but our job is to try the things nobody is asking for, because they don't know they can be.