Was the interest to further this technology or make money?

tags:: #technology #money-motives projects::hist1900-memex/docs/source_notes/@franaWebThereWas2004

“More than 250 people attended the second Gopher conference in 1993. Among them were representatives from Apple, the Center for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval, the Chronicle of Higher Education, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the New York Times, the Northwestern Online Total Integrated System (NOTIS), the World Bank, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and many universities from around the world in 1993.” (Frana, 2004, p. 25)

I wonder if the interest in Gopher technology from these major companies was in the interest of making money, or further developing a new and exciting technology.

I would usually lean towards the money making side of things, but since there was no forseeable way to make money from the Gopher protocol, this even being one of the major reasons it failed, I struggle to make an opinion on which one it could be.