Why didn't investors put money toward creating the real actual moonshot? Because, amazing idea that it was, there was no sustainable business there.
Just because an idea is inspiring, amazing, even culturally transformative, that doesn't mean it can be a business. And generally speaking, investors are only interested in ideas that can be businesses. (That's what makes them investors instead of philanthropists...or politicians.)
Here's another reason--new technologies don't always win, because older technologies improve too. When I was editing a tech e-newsletter over a decade ago, a major hot new technology was called organic light-emitting diodes (OLED). This display technology had a huge viewing angle, did not need a backlight, and was super power efficient. It could be printed onto plastic substrates that were flexible and even translucent. It was going to kill the LCD.
Except, it didn't. LCDs improved fast enough to hold onto the market--they got LED backlights, power efficiency, higher and higher resolutions, better viewing angles, better colors, and (maybe most importantly) cheaper and cheaper and cheaper because the volumes were so huge. And it turned out that OLED's had some problems that were not so easily solved. So while OLED is used commercially today, the volumes are small. LCDs, so far, have kept on winning.
Just because an idea is inspiring, amazing, even culturally transformative, that doesn't mean it can be a business. And generally speaking, investors are only interested in ideas that can be businesses. (That's what makes them investors instead of philanthropists...or politicians.)
Here's another reason--new technologies don't always win, because older technologies improve too. When I was editing a tech e-newsletter over a decade ago, a major hot new technology was called organic light-emitting diodes (OLED). This display technology had a huge viewing angle, did not need a backlight, and was super power efficient. It could be printed onto plastic substrates that were flexible and even translucent. It was going to kill the LCD.
Except, it didn't. LCDs improved fast enough to hold onto the market--they got LED backlights, power efficiency, higher and higher resolutions, better viewing angles, better colors, and (maybe most importantly) cheaper and cheaper and cheaper because the volumes were so huge. And it turned out that OLED's had some problems that were not so easily solved. So while OLED is used commercially today, the volumes are small. LCDs, so far, have kept on winning.