Reading books about the evolution of computing from different angles, it quickly becomes clear 1) how few ideas are original and/or how few are big leaps vs. incremental steps that tends to occur multiple places at once even in the beginning; e.g. the number of internal projects that would have been "close enough" that were cancelled because competitors beat them by mere months. 2) how much innovation gets stomped into the ground because of ridiculous reasons such as corporate politics.

While there certainly are amazing people doing amazing things that deserve recognition, it seems increasingly clear to me that if any of them weren't there, the space would have been filled, and quickly. Maybe in different ways and things wouldn't be the same, but history is so full of independent near-simultaneous invention of practically the same things that it seems that a lot of ideas end up being realized not because of some unique intellect, but because their time has come, and the best these people can do is speed it up a bit.

Marketing and adoption is a different issue - I think William Gibson got it right: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

A lot of the challenge of innovation is not the innovation itself, but getting the knowledge to filter out there. Arguably, it's first the last decade or so that languages like Lisp and Smalltalk has won people over - not by themselves, but by the success of an increasing array of languages created by people who were inspired by them that themselves have taken years to get traction.

And even then there are so many low hanging fruit that has not seen traction because, frankly, people are busy, and the amazing stuff often isn't the work most likely to pay the bills then and there.