At the beginning of a venture it is required that the idea generator person is optimistic, dreamy, romantic and visionary (overlapping definitions here). Also required is a healthy dose of denial – healthy in terms of “a lot” but also “useful” because the vision holds up fine even when you don’t know the solution to every issue. We admire Jobs precisely because he was told “it couldn’t be done” at every turn of every undertaking.

Later, you need realism, science and exact engineering because no problem is too small because the hardware will NOT overlook the unsolved issues. The hardware is uniformly unforgiving and painfully objective. Even the tiniest typo bug can be elevated to show-stopper if it brings the whole system to its knees.

Copyright, the law, may or may not be broken but it’s definitely buggy and the way it’s handled on the ‘Net is way broken which in turn elevates even the smallest problems into show-stoppers. It’s quite possible that if we just fix the show-stoppers the system will work as intended again.

If so, we’ll need some romantic, visionary optimism to identify the fixes.