>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.

Was there ever a time when betting that computer scientists would not make better algorithms was a good idea?

Which of those investments are you saying would have been a poor choice in 1999?

All of them, without exception. Just recently, Sprint sold their fiber business for $1 lmfao. Or WorldCom. Or NetRail, Allied Riser, PSINet, FNSI, Firstmark, Carrier 1, UFO Group, Global Access, Aleron Broadband, Verio...

All fiber went bust because despite internet's huge increase in traffic, the amount of packets per fiber increased a handful of magnitudes.

But you’re saying investing in multiplexing and compression was also dumb?

Nope, I'm not

Then your overarching thesis is not very clear. Is it simply ‘don’t invest in hardware capital, software always makes it worthless’?

It's more like: don't invest $100B in capital when there's still orders of magnitude improvements in software to be made.