>It's more like you are in 1999, people are spending $100B in fiber, while a lot of computer scientists are working in compression, multiplexing, etc.

But nobody knows what's around the corner and what future brings....for example back in day Excite didn't want to buy Google for $1m because they thought that's a lot of money. You need to spend money to make money and yea, you need to spend sometimes a lot of money on "crazy" projects because it can pay off big time.