Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Tim Berners-Lee at MITRE

Today I was very excited to hear Tim Berners-Lee speak at MITRE. I have heard many excellent speakers at MIT and Sloan, and was excited to have the true inventor of the World Wide Web at MITRE.

However, MITRE severely limited Berners-Lee's topics. They asked only that he discuss history; nothing too technical and nothing from the future. For the techies out there, he had only one line devoted to RDP and the Semantic Web.

Here is my metaphor: MITRE has God come to speak to the company. They ask Him not to talk about why He created the world or how He did it. He should definitely steer clear of why we are here, or what will happen in the future. He should only read from Genesis.

I know I do not blog about work, but I felt this incident merited comment. Here we have one of the most amazing innovators and most-forward thinking people in the world, and we ask him for a history lesson. What a waste.

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