I like this quotation because there’s been a lot of chatter about how the current crop of funded companies are only incremental improvements on things that came before them—and that there is no way they can create the kind of shareholder value that solving big hairy problems can. The truth is, Page is probably right. Perfectly clean energy would be more valuable than Google, Cisco, and Microsoft combined—it would disrupt the entire oil industry.

There’s something appealing about the idea of a technology that shoots for the moon. But the problem is that it’s too obvious. Google wasn’t obvious until it disrupted Yahoo, AltaVista, and all the other search-portal hybrids. Big obvious problems attract lots of attention from brilliant technologists. Big obvious problems are usually really hard to solve. Because they’re so difficult to solve, people try and compensate with money, so a lot of really smart people attacking big obvious problems end up doing their research from within the bowels of academia or large corporations (ever look at the amounts of funding biotech companies take?).

But when solutions come out of the bowels of these giants, they’re often squelched—particularly if they’re too disruptive to existing business models (just look at AOL). Big improvements come from the margins. The industrial revolution didn’t happen overnight. It came from strange little improvements like the cotton gin that allowed industries to develop around it organically. That sounds a lot more like YouTube than cold fusion to me.