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The point of the article is that Silicon Valley used to be focused on hardcore infrastructure like semiconductors, networking, operational systems. Note that al

• chegra 16y ago
  What I think people are refering to is Technical Risk vs. Market Risk. Before Silicon Valley companies were working on stuff they don't know will work but if they did, they were basically guaranteed customers, Technical Risk. For instance building a faster circuit, a startup whose goal is achieve such a mission has no way of knowing whether it would work, but if it did work there would be tons of people buying. Lately, people are working on stuff with market risk. Stuff that are market risk tend to be well understood technically, but there is no guarantee that people will buy. For instance a Facebook clone, the chances are slim that people will move from Facebook to this new web application but there is no doubt on whether someone can build it. Technical Risk generally has the property, if you can build, they would come. Market Risk generally has the property, everybody will build it, more than likely nobody will come[except to one or two].