Brendan Eich wrote javascript in 10 days by himself and look at javascript today! Don't discount a single person's work. Besides, a single Picasso that according to wikipedia was painted in an afternoon in 1932 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_R%C3%AAve_%28painting%29) sold in 2013 for $155 million dollars.
Monty may, if all goes well, absolutely completely revolutionize digital media, so don't assume he can't. Let us see what he comes up with before we rule it inadequate.
This is actually really interesting to me. I can imagine the complexities of building a programming language (it was a undergrad course in my school!) but how is building a new multimedia codec that much more difficult?
Does it have anything to do with most multimedia techniques being patent encumbered?
I took an undergrad Compilers course at my school. We wrote a compiler from scratch in one semester. Our compiler parsed and compiled a useful subset of Pascal, but changing it to a novel programming language would have been trivial. It doesn't have to be a GOOD programming language, just a new one.
For a multimedia codec, though, there's no low-hanging fruit. H.264 is already VERY good, so beating it is hard.
