I met these really nice undergrads who had somehow convinced O'Reilly to give them free press passes to the conference in the name of an undergrad weekly newspaper -- which is akin to me getting a free pass by telling O'Reilly I'm going to write it up for my blog. I respect ingenuity in the face of relative poverty and exclusion, especially from people under drinking age.
Anyway, they had very long faces after the Microsoft Research presentation on Wallop, and came over (I think) to get some sympathy. Basically, they felt as if MSR had taken its 500 lb gorilla self and sat on all their cool ideas. And because it's Microsofty, Wallop is bigger, glossier, more function-packed and infinitely more robust than anything two undergrads could put together in a semester. It synthesizes a lot of thinking about PC-based group communication into one overwhelming package.
I sympathized. I did. It always sucks when you learn that your brilliant idea has already been had, articulated, developed, and publicized by older and better funded people. Oh, and it also sucks when they're getting paid to work on it 8+ hours a day and you're paying tuition.
But so what if they feel that Wallop has blocked an entire avenue of creative development? So what if they feel that a lot of their own thinking and insight has been steamrollered by a monster truck that they're not even allowed to drive? Knowing what you're NOT going to do can sometimes produce more knowledge than knowing exactly where you're going.
What I tried to tell the undergrads, in my own confused and ham-handed way, is that their job is not to compete with the MSRs of the world. Their job is to find the interesting ideas that MSR can't imagine (being more established can be a barrier to certain kinds of innovation, Shawn Fanning being a case in point), then run with them. MSR is doing Wallop - they should go off and do something else more exciting.
I'm not sure if they believed me. I'm glad I'm not an undergrad anymore.
