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The challenge even when "VCs do what China does and start pouring money into hard stuff, not just fluffy software" is that like Feynman's There's Plenty of Room
by yourapostasy 6y ago
The challenge even when "VCs do what China does and start pouring money into hard stuff, not just fluffy software" is that like Feynman's There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom observation, there is plenty of innovation room in the intricacies of "low-end", "low-margin" manufacturing. Divorcing that operational, get-your-hands-dirty aspect from your business closes off insights that arise from the ongoing software-eats-the-world wave still building up steam around the world.
The more you cram together the people networks, culture, knowledge, tooling and practices of how to create all this stuff into a single ecosystem, the more they start making Burke-like Connections. Thinking you can Jira-innovate your way to dominance on an ever-narrowing technology stack is architecture astronaut'ing on a strategic corporate scale.
If Amazon had outsourced their IT operations to an IBM, would their internal culture still have de novo evolved the nascent devops principles back then into AWS?
It isn't what Intel gives up now by selling this business that will hurt their innovation. It is the options that suddenly get a lot more expensive to investigate in the future for future innovation. Technology innovation is evolution: extremely messy, more dead ends than successful adaptations, enormously energy-intensive from lots of majority-repetition, and highly organic. You can certainly optimize around the edges to make it slightly less jagged-edge, but innovation sparks at the tiny interstices, usually not at the top.
- tharne 6y agoIt's amazing that pretty much every economist, journalist, business school professor and overpaid McKinsey consultant miss this critical point about how innovation works.
- yourapostasy 6y agoIndeed. And it is even more amazing that "staunch free market advocates" among this leadership cadre mostly do not see the parallels between evolution and capitalism. And they blithely praise the innovative superiority of capitalism in one meeting, then create elaborate narratives how selling off "non-core" capabilities shrinking their innovation Petri dish agar surface area increases innovation in the next meeting. Somehow the innovation spurred by capitalism from the freewheeling, chaotic free market is suddenly amenable when it crosses the corporate threshold to sprints, top-down grand corporate architectural visions, and five-year plans. I wish as much as anyone innovation wasn't such a massively, messily, wasteful, organic process. But after decades of experience bashing my head against the wall with everyone else trying the top-down, bottle-it-up-and-sell-it hopeium, I've been pleasantly surprised with "letting go" and letting the "floor" mix it up, take input from it, feed back into it, and create a constantly-boiling stew of ideas. The finance management part in me has to be locked away in the padded cell here and there for their own good, but they and I can't argue with the results.
- hibbelig 6y agoI think the consultants get paid for it, which helps.
- jjoonathan 6y agoYep. China figured out that they can just pay the hand to shoot the foot. The hand commissions some academic opinions on the virtues of foot-shooting so that in the unlikely case someone tries to hold it accountable it can claim it didn't know that foot-shooting was bad.
- coliveira 6y agoSorry, but China didn't do this, it was the US that did it to itself. China just saw the opportunity and acted on it.
- jjoonathan 6y agoIt takes two to tango.
- coliveira 6y agoThere is a big difference. The US was led astray due to its economic ideology. There was a concerted effort to move industry to other countries, so that salaries in the US would be depressed for lower income classes and the owners of industry could realize larger profits for a generation. Now the country is finally realizing that this is a losing proposition, while China saw the opportunity and based its economy on industrialization and scientific research.
- jjoonathan 6y agoYes, that's what happened. Yes, the US was incredibly stupid and had a big hand (the biggest) in its own downfall. No, that doesn't mean China's hands are clean in the matter. Ultimately, politics are amoral and it doesn't matter, but to the extent that we're interested in making purely academic moral distinctions there's no need to whitewash China's actions. They did us dirty, and if we have the option to do them dirty back, we should take it without the slightest sliver of shame or guilt. Politics is amoral. In any case, we absolutely should not let our natural inclinations towards an underdog story cloud our judgement. China isn't an underdog anymore.