I read somewhere that in the early days of telephone, early adopters had a tough time selling the technology to city businesses. Back then, it was standard practice for executives to dictate messages to secretaries, who typed them up to be sent to the mail room, where they would then be rushed by bike messengers across town to the mail rooms of other businesses, which would then deliver them to the executives upstairs.

When presented with the idea of a telephone, executives thought, "Why bother? We'd just be saving the bike messenger a trip, and they're cheaper than the telephone would be, so it's not worth it." They couldn't imagine simply picking up the phone on their desk to call someone. Even when presented with this possibility, they'd shrug it off as a nice idea, but not what they needed.

Telephones were a revolutionary advance that were destined to change the very nature of business, but executives couldn't see this because they were looking through incremental lenses. They couldn't see past their existing procedures and biases. They couldn't imagine the world we now take for granted.

Most such advances are slowed down by skeptics: automobiles, airplanes, microcomputers, the Web. As Jim Hendler pointed out in his speech, they start by saying, "Why?", then once we're past the "knee in the curve", they all clamor to ask "How?" This is just the nature of progress, and it's probably a good thing.

What irks me, though, isn't the skeptical marketplace, it's the naysaying pundits. Whenever I read commentary with clever contempt for the Semantic Web, I say to myself, "There's that incremental thinking again." While I know in the end it won't really matter, since revolutionary advances have a way of sweeping the skeptics into line whether they like it or not, it still makes it tougher those of us trying to build things.

Why can't they see it? Doesn't it call them the same way? Well, apparently not, which makes our role, as advocates, that much more important. We have to paint a clearer picture. We have to convince them with results.