Doesn't every place have a collection of ideas that are half implemented? I know I often choose between finishing somebody else's project or proving we don't need it and decommissioning it.
I'm convinced it's just human nature to work on something while it is interesting and move on. What is the motivation to actually finish?
Why would the the technologies that should hold up the Internet itself be any different?
While that's true, it dismisses the large body of work that has been completed. The technologies GP comment mentions are complete in the sense that they work, but the deployment is only partial. Herding cats on a global scale, in most cases. It also ignores the side effect benefit that completing the interesting part -- other efforts benefit from the lessons learned by that disrupted effort, even if the deployment fails because it turns out nobody wanted it. And sometimes it's just a matter of time and getting enough large stakeholders excited or at least convinced the cost of migration is worth it.
All that said, even the sense of completing or finishing a thing only really happens in small and limited-scope things, and in that sense it's very much human nature, yeah. You can see this in creative works, too. It's rarely "finished" but at some point it's called done.
I'm convinced it's just human nature to work on something while it is interesting and move on. What is the motivation to actually finish?
Why would the the technologies that should hold up the Internet itself be any different?