At some point you have to stop blaming Gutenberg for the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, and understand that what was birthed into being with the printing press was more momentous than the particulars of his Mainz workshop and what he did there.
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Take his famous bible, which was a business mistake. There was little demand for bibles, as the only version was the Vulgate (translated by St. Jerome in the 4th century). The whole point of pre-Protestant Catholicism was that the laity didn't read the bible. The market was tiny.
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As he burned through cash, he hit upon a short-term revenue solution: he printed indulgences for the Church. That's right, the same Gutenberg whose invention Luther would use to inveigh against church indulgences, printed them to pay the bills.
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He finally hit 'product-market fit' when he printed a book with pent-up demand: a Latin grammer written in the 4th century by Donatus. In a medieval Europe of mongrel regional dialects, Latin was the lingua franca of every academic or professional. https://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/donatus.html …
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But he got there too late. After years of work and many thousands of guilders spent, the VCs sued and took the company from him (like so many defenestrated startup CEOs) right as the technology was reaching maturity. He'd never see the windfall his genius invention produced.
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What are the lessons to draw here? For starters, what we call the 'printing press' was actually a collection of technologies that came to fruition at the right time. Gutenberg had to source new kinds of paper, develop new inks, and invent the very notion of typefaces.
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Likewise, what we call 'the Internet' or 'Facebook' (or whatever) is really the magic combo of the TCP/IP routing layer, the hardware of smartphones, an addictive and adopted application layer, and ubiquitous wireless connectivity.
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End of conversation
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