Not only is the author a troll -- as pointed out, he runs the Fake Steve Jobs blog -- his primary source, Nathan Myhyrvhvhlodold, is a troll. Let me clarify:

Not only is the author a troll -- as pointed out, he runs the Fake Steve Jobs blog -- his primary source, Nathan Myhyrvhvhlodold, is a troll. Let me clarify: Nathan might be a genius, but he's a genius whose words we can't ever risk taking seriously because of the raging conflicts of interest that imbue his every interaction with the press or social media. His company: > "Intellectual Ventures is a private company claiming to invest in "pure invention." Their business model has a focus on developing a large patent portfolio and licensing these to companies with infringing products." Myhrvold brings smart scientists and thinkers into a room, picks their brains, and then he and his own very smart people sit down and come up with as many patents as they can. They aren't driven by malice. They're driven by rational self-interest: presently, with our broken patent system, people who aren't actually going to go out there and try to solve the world's problems can sit in a room all day coming up with ideas and make money from that. Let's run his statements through a conflict-of-interest filter: "Silicon Valley is working on easy problems" translates to: > Hey world, it's only cool to work on things that require large up-front investment on PATENT-FRIENDLY products, so people with lots of patents can make money by attaching ourselves to the necks of people who are actually making the world a better place instead of talking about it. Tempting, Nate. More to the point, it's tempting to get sucked into rebutting individual points, such as the fact that those heroes of the valley would have killed to have the resources available now to anyone with a credit card, Linode and Twilio.com. Or the fact that he's essentially complaining about low barriers to entry. Or the fact that things that start easy and trivial, in the early stages, quickly get deep and techy. It's easy to mock things that look facebook-y, but it's hard to solve, say, 10k or 100k continuous connections, or to write fast evented code or contribute to libraries that make the whole world faster. We start simple and get smart. But if you start rebutting these things, you've been sucked into a hole. The issue is, he wants people to work on patent-friendly stuff. Fin.