10 ms·

Peter Thiel: "I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough"

116 points by llambda 15y ago

fennecfoxen 15y ago
Nope. It's more of a "deployment of technology" breakthrough. Most of the individual technologies there have been around for a while.
- snpnx 15y ago
  That, and a very well designed user-interface are what make the iPhone exceptional. That's why many 'geeks' don't feel it's worth the praise, there are better phones out there in terms of technology, but hardly in terms of usability.
ryandvm 15y ago
Thiel is right. In 100 years, people are still going to be talking about inventors like Ford and Edison. I doubt you'll find 22nd century schoolchildren reading about the little company that made shiny, walled-garden media players.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Ford and Edison. You see the irony there, right?
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    Wikipedia on "incandescent light bulb"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb): In addressing the question of who invented the incandescent lamp, historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. On "phonograph" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph): Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to produce a device that could both record and reproduce sound... [Charles] Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the Phonograph in 1877. I won't bother to quote the enormous list of Henry Ford's predecessors that appears in e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile. I'd never do them justice.
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      Okay, I take it back: One link to a predecessor of Henry Ford, because the story is just too fun for words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz On the way, [Bertha Benz] solved numerous problems. She had to find ligroin as a fuel, which was available only at apothecary shops so she stopped in Wiesloch at the city pharmacy to purchase the fuel. A blacksmith had to help mend a chain at one point. Brakes needed to be repaired; in doing so Bertha Benz invented brake lining. She also had to use a long, straight hairpin to clean a fuel pipe, which had become blocked, and to insulate a wire with a garter. She left Mannheim around dawn and reached Pforzheim somewhat after dusk, notifying her husband of her successful journey by telegram. She drove back to Mannheim the next day. I can't believe that I haven't heard this story before. Note that at this point in 1888 Henry Ford is still servicing steam engines; he'll start his personal experiments in gasoline engines in earnest in 1893.
- ralphsaunders 15y ago
  Do they teach about what Ford did today?
- comatose_kid 15y ago
  Introducing your biases does not strengthen your argument. No one really knows what people will be talking about in 100 years. That said, the iPhone seems to be as good a candidate as your examples. The interface was revolutionary compared to the devices which came before it, and the idea that 3rd parties could distribute apps without going thru the carriers was also a big change.
- Saavedro 15y ago
  "the little company that made shiny, walled-garden media players" Yup. That's all Apple ever did all right.
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  I don't think that's true. I think the innovation of the iPhone was in two areas... 1. It was the first product to popularize touch. That's going to have a big impact in the future of technology. The gestures pioneered by the iPhone (swipe, pinch to zoom) could very well exist 100 years from now and if they do the iPhone will be their ancestor. That's a big deal. 2. The iPhone saved Apple and Apple changed the conversation in technology. 10 years ago adding more features and giving users 20 different ways to do things was considered an asset. Now the technology industry has changed direction back towards designing a product and giving the user 1 way to do things that's easier. I'm inclined to believe we'll eventually reach a happy medium between those two philosophies but there's no doubt the design side was losing out before Apple's resurgence.
jinushaun 15y ago
I think Thiel is frustrated that innovation in this country has shifted from science and technology to mobile phones and banner ads. The best and brightest are working in the wrong industry. Instead of researching alternative energy, space travel, health, etc, we're researching thinner smartphones with better battery life and more effective ways to sell ads. Makes me wonder how far along we'd be, technologically, if YouTube and Facebook had never been invented... We're just too distracted now. Maybe Fermi's Paradox can be explained by alien civilisations becoming too busy posting cat videos on Twitter to invent inter-stellar travel.
- marknutter 15y ago
  You really think that people aren't researching health, alternative energy, and space travel?
- farsmith 15y ago
  Ads aren't an end to themselves. Back in the day they made possible free TV and well funded newspapers. Now they make it possible for even better informational services to be free
- cryptoz 15y ago
  The entire reason that SpaceX exists, along with Tesla Motors, is that Elon Musk worked hard to figure out new ways for people to send money over the internet. He made lots of money himself, and now he creates electric cars and builds spaceships. I wouldn't worry too much. Edit: confused eBay and Paypal. Musk founded Paypal.
  - laglad 15y ago
    Thanks for this point. The reason that so many intelligent and driven entrepreneurs are innovating on "less difficult" technologies is precisely because this low-hanging fruit offers a very high impact leverage right now. More people take the plunge because it costs less to start a company. Consequently, more people are working on more niche problems. This is a good thing. I'd be more concerned with improving the technical abilities of the people entering the entrepreneurial pipeline than about where they are applying themselves. Getting more technical immigrants into the USA would be a decent first step.
marknutter 15y ago
Think of all the app developers out there who are making a living off the iPhone. Think of all the web developers out there whose audience has now increased dramatically because of Facebook and iPhone getting more people to use the web. What Thiel is having a hard time with is the move to an information-centric economy. Outside of better renewable energy, we pretty much have all the bases covered for basic, comfortable human existence. It's all about the creation and dissemination of information, now.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  Compare that to the previous century. Where is the equivalent of the airplane, radio transmission, space travel, television, antibiotics, the Internet? Those were breakthroughs, not just incremental advances. There s never 'enough progress'. One should be an optimist though, there s innovation incubated in the life sciences
  - inerte 15y ago
    Although I mostly side with Tiel on his observations, to be fair you're comparing a century to a decade. And in hindsight it is easy to tell what was a breakthrough. Remember that when computers were invented few thought that we would have them in the palms of our hands.
  - jleyank 15y ago
    Hmm... I might be off by a year or two, but I think it's pretty #%!*^&% amazing that you can have a powerful computer that is a link to the world in your pocket. That was the deepest science fiction 20-30 years ago. Maybe it's due to cheap flash memory, or maybe flash memory itself. No matter, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, it would be quite nice to have alternative energy sources that were inexpensive. It would also nice to have cures for all "popular" diseases. But, compared to mucking with computers, those things cost serious money and require serious hardware. Oh, and can't be solved by "release early and release often".
- deleted 15y ago
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dman 15y ago
Thiel would have run out of karma if he had made the same observation on HN.
- igorgue 15y ago
  Good thing HN has a max of 11 downvotes (I know first hand), but I get your point, fanboyism here is strong.
  - leak 15y ago
    I never knew that! This opens up so many more opportunities to comment! Thanks!
    - igorgue 15y ago
      Hah, here's the prof http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196443 (I don't think there's any more unpopular comment you can make here) see it's -4 that shows but realistically I think I had -11 downvotes (it might be -10).
      - chc 15y ago
        -4 is the lowest score a comment can achieve. Downvotes past -4 won't reduce the post's score, but they will keep draining karma from the user. I don't think there's actually a limit on that.
        corin_ 15y ago
        Actually they will reduce the comment's score too, it just won't show. The difference is that if it is showing -4 and someone upvotes it, it won't neccesarily go to -3, because it's actual score could be much lower.
  - dman 15y ago
    Are you sure? I appeared to lose a lot more than 11 per post on this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3248916 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3248916.
negrera 15y ago
Comments like this from Peter provoke people to respond. Plain and simple. Rather than criticizing why he "thinks" the iPhone hasn't broken any boundaries, maybe he should "go-out" and stimulate more than "just 500 employees" at once (aka his reference to Twitter).
mikeryan 15y ago
“Apple is an innovative company, but I think it’s mostly a design innovator.” Which is really the crux of what Apple is (I came here to say it and saw Thiel beat me to it). Apple has always been a product innovator more then a technology innovator. The iPhone was still, very much, a breakthrough device. So was the iPod but neither were "technological breakthroughs"
r00fus 15y ago
The iPhone may not a technological breakthrough in that it changes the life of billions of people, no. In that vein, neither is Paypal, to be honest. The part that annoys me is that Thiel drops this linkbait-worthy note, then doesn't qualify it by saying what would be a technological breakthrough (I did read the new yorker summary, too). Lot of hot air here.
igorgue 15y ago
Well Peter, you're part of the problem. The more you invest in e.g.: social networks the more entrepreneurs are going to follow that instead of, you know, what you call "innovation".
- notahacker 15y ago
  This. The best recent examples of (i) companies capturing multibillion dollar markets through timing and effective implementation of existing concepts and (ii)profit bandwagon-jumping companies with no redeeming features whatsoever I can think of are both in Thiel's portfolio. you probably know which companies I'm respectively referring to. The return that he's going to generate from Facebook and Zynga may be reinvested in exciting technologies, but in the mean time his successes offer several billion reasons for others to copy his smart bets on companies whose innovations probably won't be lauded in future centuries
tptacek 15y ago
How many iconic, break-out products are ever "technological breakthroughs"? Behind virtually every iconic product is a string of lesser known antecedents with the same fundamentals but imperfect packaging, pricing, or timing. Counterexamples? Would love to hear them. Otherwise, this is an extremely banal observation on Thiel's part.
- deleted 15y ago
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- schandur 15y ago
  How many iconic, break-out products are ever "technological breakthroughs"? Behind virtually every iconic product is a string of lesser known antecedents with the same fundamentals but imperfect packaging, pricing, or timing. Reminds me of one of the themes in the book "Blue Ocean Strategy": the importance of value innovation, where the stress is on both low cost and differentiation.
- adrianwaj 15y ago
  What I think you mean to say is that breakthroughs should be about discoveries leading to an expansion of mind, that has yet to be known by any individual. It's about breaking through the known, and can occur in any field of endeavour and will lead to new information: with that information a product should be created - Steve was, and Peter is looking for those products. They are in the position to do so, but neither will have that initial expansion of mind. Seems like extracting the financial wealth of a breakthrough is why investors seek them.
- wallflower 15y ago
  > Counterexamples? Would love to hear them. One example. PCR helped catalyze the multi-billion dollar molecular biology industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction
- nirvana 15y ago
  The Mac. Nobody is disputing that every product relies on previous products. But the Mac is a good example of a technological break thru that had imperfect packaging, pricing AND timing. The packaging was too restrictive for the time. Jobs' vision was right, but the industry hadn't developed far enough that you could ship a machine without internal slots and be successful. The pricing was out of line with the rest of the market, and the rest of the market didn't recognize sufficient increase in value due to the GUI to make the pricing make sense. And of course, both of those issues were issues of timing. The Mac took several years to be successful, and depending on how you measure things, some would say it has never become successful (still only being %23 of the market or something like that.) But the Mac was a technology break thru. In fact, it contained many such breakthrus, both in hardware and software.
zerostar07 15y ago
So, if you d take a stab, in what sectors do you expect to see the real breakthroughs? My bet is on genetic medicine and the brain sciences.
- jleyank 15y ago
  Genetic engineering is going to be a tough sell with the masses. They won't touch GM corn, tomatoes, ... How the hell are they going to accept GM-mods to themselves?
  - zerostar07 15y ago
    A common characteristic of breakthroughs is that they are at first frightening
    - wallflower 15y ago
      I remember reading a Wired article that predicated GM-augmented human engineering would first gain a foothold in professional sports, namely the NFL.
      - jleyank 15y ago
        More likely something like Tour de France (O2 loading of blood)... And man, will the professional leagues have issues with this. "East German swimmers" will seem like nothing.
  - Tichy 15y ago
    If they have to choose between a genetic engineering product and dying?
nostromo 15y ago
People are following the money and innovating in places where it's possible to build a business with limited capital in a short time. In other words, the consumer internet -- which is exactly where Thiel has made his money, and made investments. Unlike the average entrepreneur however, Thiel has the ability to change that, by funding more startups like SpaceX and RoboteX, and fewer like Zynga and Spotify.
SODaniel 15y ago
Pretty obvious though necessary statement it seems. None of the 'i' products have ever been about technology and Steve Jobs was never a innovator. It's all about design and consumer behavior, starting with iTunes and ending with iTunes.
wavephorm 15y ago
Smartphones affordable enough for the third world, and pervasive wireless internet access will almost definitely have a larger impact on the world than space travel ever will.
- tree_of_item 15y ago
  Ever? That's an incredibly strong statement. Ever is a very long time. Do you think smartphones will be more important than space travel in 300 years? What will the word "smartphone" mean then?
  - wavephorm 15y ago
    I should've added 'for the foreseeable future'. Although it gives us "feel good" vibes, having a small number of people in space does not significantly improve the lives of many people.
iqster 15y ago
I'm part of the academic research community that focuses on mobile. My personal opinion is that both the iPhone and the iPad pushed the barrier of what was thought to be possible. In the case of the iPhone, it redefined browsing on small form factor devices. Yes ... pinch to zoom was published before. But the specific implementation into the web browser was pretty unique. The state of the art device prior to the iPhone was the Nokia 770 tablet. Compare that to an iPhone. W.r.t the iPad, when Jobs claimed it would last 8 hours (I think he said you could play movies the entire way on a long distance flight), I didn't believe it. Nor could other researchers I talked to. Apple's custom silicon for media playback didn't factor into people's imagination.
- pjscott 15y ago
  All those things are cool, but compare with airplanes, which made the world drastically smaller. Or with the Haber-Bosch process, which prevents us from starving. That's the kind of big breakthrough technology that Thiel is talking about. The iPhone, while really neat, doesn't quite measure up.
  - iqster 15y ago
    One of my history professors in college said something I found quite remarkable. Let me share it ... he said in the history of humanity, there have been very few revolutions. When humans figured out how to talk was one. You can suddenly communicate with others! The other big revolution was when people learned to write. Now, you ideas can span space or time. The advent of computers, telecommunications and the Internet was another such revolution. You can now instantly connect with anyone around the planet! While the iPhone can't take the credit for all this, perhaps you see why I disagree with Thiel :)
nirvana 15y ago
The iPhone contains a key invention, and several innovations. This is the simple fact of reality. The reason these stories are constantly appearing on HN, nearly 4 years since the iPhone was introduced, is because those who want to diminish the invention of multi-touch, like everyone else, sat awed at the iPhone when it was first introduced. That was a very magical moment, and if the iPhone hadn't been a radical departure, then it would have been just another cell phone introduction. It's not often you get to see a new technology that seems magical for the first time. Theil is talking in terms of making a dent in society. Obviously his standards for a "dent in the universe" are different than Steve Jobs. That's fine for him, but don't confuse it for support for your ideology. There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone. (and every time I bring this up, some one posts a link to thin-plastic keyboards from the 1970s, or the screens of the automated ticket stand at movie theaters as if they were the same.) The technology for understanding the shape of the finger when in contact with a touch sensitive display, and being able to reduce that amorphous blob down to a single pixel-- and get the pixel the user intended to touch, instead of the one at the center, or whatever, had never been done, let alone, tracking multiple fingers at the same time, a non-trivial problem. This invention enabled a raft of innovations that Apple spent 7 years developing that resulted in only the second new user interface paradigm in my lifetime- touch UI. (The first being the GUI, which was also developed under Steve Jobs.) There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here. One manifestation of that ideology is support for things like welfare, etc, because they believe that it's just chance that separates Steve Jobs from you and me. (and not hard work.) Another manifestation of it is to pretend like the products of the mind have no value at all, and one way they like to do this is to pretend like its only "good marketing" that made the iPhone successful because it was just a random collection of parts that had been invented before. Sure, LCD screens, Mac OS X, ARM CPUs, RAM, Flash memory and lithium polymer batteries existed before, and with the exception of OS X, all had appeared in other phones. To them, that means that there's nothing innovative about the iPhone. Innovation doesn't exist in their ideology, in fact, it demolishes their ideology, so they have to pretend like nothing was invented for the iPhone. Inevitably, when anyone expresses any defense of innovation you get a lot of nonsense claims about touch panel displays int he 1970s as if that were "prior art" for multi-touch. I've even seen people on Hacker News insist that Xerox invented the GUI. (showing either they don't know what a GUI is, or they don't care.) To the extent that this ideology has succeeded in america, we have an economic depression, little growth in industry, a great shrinking in american manufacturing jobs (because this ideology has regulated them out of being competitive with the world market) etc. This ideology might even succeed to the point where a major institution of this country, enshrined in the constitution itself, is destroyed, simply because Google wants to make a competitive phone without bothering to spend 7 years coming up with something innovative itself. That would be a real shame... because the place that road leads is one where the president has a "kill switch" for the internet, things like SOPA are the law of the land, and startups have to get permission from government to operate their businesses, just like manufacturers do now, and said permission isn't going to come unless you have a lot of pull. We've seen what government control over the purse strings in an "innovative" area results in: Democratic contributors getting $500M loans from government for "green energy" only to go bust a few years later... its just a looting of the public for the direct benefit of politicians and their friends. This is the aristocracy of "pull". It's instructive to remember that Theil is a prominent libertarian, and thus very clearly not a proponent of this ideology. All this has happened before, and repeatedly. The USA is the last remaining beacon of innovation in the world. I understand that Hacker News is frequented by a lot of college age or early 20s hackers. Don't fall for the anti-innovation, anti-mind, anti-science, anti-intellectual ideology that says Apple is evil for inventing new things or putting the product and customer first, and those who just ship ripoff products are to be commended. Don't fall for the claims that inventing is useless, and that america is destined to just be like china (Where everything we make is a ripoff of something invented somewhere else.) To paraphrase Margarat Thatcher: The problem with not inventing anything yourself is, eventually you run out of other people's inventions to rip off. In fact you can see this now: The android market is commoditized. Nobody is innovating, and nobody is making any money. In fact, Apples commanding %56 of the entire phone industries profits with only %5 of the smartphones, while most phones still aren't even smartphones. (this is why android marketshare is surging, its becoming the new feature phone). This is a significant lesson for people who want to do startups. I learned it by trying to sell things on ebay when I was young: If you don't have anything unique or innovative, you can only compete on price. And that's a race to the bottom. To the extent that innovative companies can succeed, it is good for the startup economy. To the extent that anything innovative is ripped off, with no recourse, then the larger companies will maintain dominance because newer companies have nothing to compete with, and can't compete on economies of scale. The more things go that way, the less viable startups become and the less innovation society will have from which to benefit.
1010010111 15y ago
It's a design breakthrough. What's inside, the inexpensive, mass-produced components, is more or less the same as what's in all the competing devices. But the design, the packaging, is a breakthrough. What's problematic about this Apple popularism and Apple's hermetically sealed approach to selling computing devices is that it does not encourage, let alone even permit, people to learn about what's on the inside and how it works. These are computing devices, not refrigerators. And in the _grand scheme_ of things, that inhibits progress. It limits the potential pool of competitors and innovators. Though it preserves the competitive advantage of businesses like Apple, Intel and others. Increased consumer uptake fueled by elegant design certainly furthers what they can do. But the incentives for them to innovate are limited. Do the minimum. Reap the maximum. That's just smart business.
- jarcoal 15y ago
  It's easy to think that it does limit progress, but it likely does not. Any company that can get people to excited about technology will positively contribute to the future of the industry. It is probably an extremely controversial thought, but Apple might be responsable for pushing more people into development/engineer jobs than Linux. I know I found my passion for technology through Apple, which eventually led me to Linux. I bet I'm not alone.
  - 1010010111 15y ago
    I anticipated this response. That is why I emphasize _grand scheme_. Short term, I agree with you. Long term, I do not.
danso 15y ago
Sometimes, refinement is a breakthrough. The AK-47 was not the first automatic rifle nor the most powerful or advanced. But because of its clean design and deployability, it is likely the most significant firearm in modern human history. What about those statistics that show that a relative modest reduction in consumption would do more to save the environment and energy supplies than any foreseeable technological breakthrough in the next 50 years? Any refinement of technology today to reduce consumption would likely bore someone like Thiel; at the same time, they may also do more to save the world. Why is break-out innovation not to be respected?
poppysan 15y ago
I agree that it was not a great technological breakthrough on it's own, but it is greatly responsible for a lot of folk's interest in new technology and programming among other things, which should not be understated.
ramanujan 15y ago
The fundamental reason that most innovation has occurred in the computer/internet sector over the last 40-something years is that failure is acceptable in this sector. That is, when a computer or webapp crashes it's not the end of the world. But a failure in a drug or car or power plant means serious consequences, and sometimes fatalities, and subsequent regulations/laws to make sure such things are never tried again. Now, you can make a pretty convincing argument[0] that we are as a society committing Bastiat's fallacy ("Seen vs. Unseen"), in that there are more lives lost due to not developing new drugs than there are due to failures of new drugs. The failures are seen, the lack of new drugs is not seen. However, the deeper point is that we are currently simply too wealthy as a society to tolerate the human costs (in deaths[1]) associated with rapid innovation in real world technologies. Wealth means necessities are met, but necessity is the mother of invention. This is why war and serious hardship gooses technological innovation. It's because life becomes cheaper, and test pilots and volunteers for new vaccines become more readily available. I don't think Thiel would disagree[2] with this analysis, but it does mean that the problem can't be solved simply through shifts in entrepreneurial focus. Americans simply aren't ready for the kind of messiness that real world innovation involves. [0] http://bit.ly/mtGRyv http://bit.ly/mtGRyv [1] Perhaps strangely, we are more ready to allow people to take futile risks like bungee jumping or skydiving than we are to allow people to consciously opt out of various health/safety/etc. regulations (and suffer the consequences). [2] Taking the totality of his statements in context, including the article on the Founders Fund website ("What Happened to the Future?"), Thiel and Levchin's point is not that the iPhone isn't innovative but more that there hasn't been much innovation in big areas like energy, medicine, and transportation. Indeed, by some measures we're moving backwards in those areas: the real price of energy has gone up, new drug approvals have stagnated, and top speeds have gone down since the Concorde was retired.
- Mvandenbergh 15y ago
  Drug trials fail all the time though, and not only because of risk aversion. If you look at the first 50 years or so of the pharmaceutical industry, there were wonder drugs being discovered every year. We may simply have exhausted a lot of the low hanging small molecule fruit. Also, if risk aversion was slowing pharma innovation then we'd see a lot of potentially efficacious compounds failing safety trials. Instead what we see is that the cost to discover candidate compounds before they're ever tested on humans.
ajkessler 15y ago
“Five hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy ? It may not be enough to dramatically improve living standards in the U.S. over the next decade or two decades.” It's strange that someone as successful as Peter Thiel has been in the startup world, a world built on providing value, would make such a statement. What does the number of permanent or semi-permanent jobs have to do with the amount of value being created by something like twitter? If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not. If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own. Also, he seems to equate increased $$ with increased living standards. By and large that's been historically true, but it's a bit misleading. Even if twitter made 0 money and created 0 jobs, it would still improve living standards. Certainly not in the way indoor plumbing or electricity raised living standards, but it still makes people's lives easier, which, by definition, improves living standards.
- AlisdairO 15y ago
  > If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not. > If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own. I think it depends, really. Historically, talented people have created new industries/companies that employed a lot of less talented people and allowed them to live a comfortable life. I suspect the focus of his worry is that these less talented people are nowadays less often reaping the benefits of the innovations talented people create.
  - ajkessler 15y ago
    Historically, those industries required less talented people in order to stay in business. Somebody has to sell the product, answer the phones, sweep the floors, etc. If you created a company that could operate with out all of those less talented people, this would be a boon. Even if you presume all those less talented employees are mindless drones, if you can provide the same service with fewer employees, you now have all the value created by that service, plus you have all those extra mindless drones to go produce value someplace else. As to your second point, I can't imagine that's what he's really thinking. The few talented people who create the twitters, iphones, etcs, are far outnumbered by the millions of less-talented people who actually use those products.
Zarathust 15y ago
A lot of innovation we're seeing now is the result of miniaturization of older technologies, such as touchscreen, cell phones and computers. I'd say that the IPhone is rather an innovation in the lifestyle of their owners, more than a technological innovation per se. I've been arguing this point for a few years now, that smartphones are cool devices, but rather fall in the gadget category than the civilization changing techs they are sometimes compared to.
joshu 15y ago
Technological, no. UI/UX? Definitely.
gamble 15y ago
"Innovation" is a glittering generality that tech companies and their admirers feel obliged to assume, but most successful companies are built on execution rather than innovation. Apple is actually an exemplar of execution over innovation. Since Jobs returned, none of their genre-defining products have been fundamentally novel. Even the iPad represents a category people have been trying to get right for twenty years without success. Apple likes to identify markets with demand but immature products, so that they can learn from the mistakes of earlier entrants and launch with an extremely polished, market defining product. I don't hold this approach against Apple. On the contrary, I wish there were more companies that obsessed about creating polished, highly-functional products that run a little behind the technological curve, rather than the slapped-together assemblages of new parts from Asian electronics manufacturers' supply catalog that typify the industry.
sendos 15y ago
> "I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough" Isn't this essentially a strawman, since no one is claiming that the iPhone is a Technological Breakthrough? At the time the iPhone came out, lots of people noted that it actually lagged technologically behind its smartphone peers (no 3G, subpar SMS functionality, etc), which was correct. And yet it won, it showed smartphone companies how to make a smartphone, and they have been copying that design/approach ever since. The iPhone didn't win because it was a technological breakthrough, and everyone in tech knows this, so I'm not sure why Thiel's comment is that noteworthy.
sehugg 15y ago
The App Store and VoiceOver. The former shifted the power balance between devs and carriers (creating thousands of jobs) and the latter has changed the lives of many visually-impaired. I understand the iPhone ref is a strawman, but not a very good one.
andyl 15y ago
Lots of comments here defending Apple. I think the relevant question is: why don't we see more innovation in energy, transportation or medicine?
shn 15y ago
I am totally disagree. Although the breakthroughs in the tech scene are not as groundbreaking as it seems, the implications for social interaction, commerce and education is astounding. I believe we are yet to see the fruits of internet and related technologies in the years ahead of us. Khan Academy, Stanford's online classes, and tons of other educational material available through internet I believe effecting a lot of people's lives.
loup-vaillant 15y ago
> Having a fully functioning computer in your pocket opens up entirely new experiences—and markets. […] Social media, combined with mobile technologies, are powering protests and revolutions around the world and changing the way people consume information. While I somewhat agree with this, I can't help but feel that much more is possible[1]. With current technology. If people actually owned their pocket computers, both in theory[2] and in practice[3], the changes would be much more profound. [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/2c/a_sense_that_more_is_possible http://lesswrong.com/lw/2c/a_sense_that_more_is_possible [2] http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ [3] http://vpri.org/ http://vpri.org/ http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

116 points by llambda 15y ago

Nope. It's more of a "deployment of technology" breakthrough. Most of the individual technologies there have been around for a while.

snpnx 15y ago
That, and a very well designed user-interface are what make the iPhone exceptional. That's why many 'geeks' don't feel it's worth the praise, there are better phones out there in terms of technology, but hardly in terms of usability.

ryandvm 15y ago

Thiel is right. In 100 years, people are still going to be talking about inventors like Ford and Edison. I doubt you'll find 22nd century schoolchildren reading about the little company that made shiny, walled-garden media players.

tptacek 15y ago
Ford and Edison. You see the irony there, right?
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Wikipedia on "incandescent light bulb"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb): In addressing the question of who invented the incandescent lamp, historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. On "phonograph" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph): Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to produce a device that could both record and reproduce sound... [Charles] Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the Phonograph in 1877. I won't bother to quote the enormous list of Henry Ford's predecessors that appears in e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile. I'd never do them justice.
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    Okay, I take it back: One link to a predecessor of Henry Ford, because the story is just too fun for words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz On the way, [Bertha Benz] solved numerous problems. She had to find ligroin as a fuel, which was available only at apothecary shops so she stopped in Wiesloch at the city pharmacy to purchase the fuel. A blacksmith had to help mend a chain at one point. Brakes needed to be repaired; in doing so Bertha Benz invented brake lining. She also had to use a long, straight hairpin to clean a fuel pipe, which had become blocked, and to insulate a wire with a garter. She left Mannheim around dawn and reached Pforzheim somewhat after dusk, notifying her husband of her successful journey by telegram. She drove back to Mannheim the next day. I can't believe that I haven't heard this story before. Note that at this point in 1888 Henry Ford is still servicing steam engines; he'll start his personal experiments in gasoline engines in earnest in 1893.
ralphsaunders 15y ago
Do they teach about what Ford did today?
comatose_kid 15y ago
Introducing your biases does not strengthen your argument. No one really knows what people will be talking about in 100 years. That said, the iPhone seems to be as good a candidate as your examples. The interface was revolutionary compared to the devices which came before it, and the idea that 3rd parties could distribute apps without going thru the carriers was also a big change.
Saavedro 15y ago
"the little company that made shiny, walled-garden media players" Yup. That's all Apple ever did all right.
TomOfTTB 15y ago
I don't think that's true. I think the innovation of the iPhone was in two areas... 1. It was the first product to popularize touch. That's going to have a big impact in the future of technology. The gestures pioneered by the iPhone (swipe, pinch to zoom) could very well exist 100 years from now and if they do the iPhone will be their ancestor. That's a big deal. 2. The iPhone saved Apple and Apple changed the conversation in technology. 10 years ago adding more features and giving users 20 different ways to do things was considered an asset. Now the technology industry has changed direction back towards designing a product and giving the user 1 way to do things that's easier. I'm inclined to believe we'll eventually reach a happy medium between those two philosophies but there's no doubt the design side was losing out before Apple's resurgence.

jinushaun 15y ago

I think Thiel is frustrated that innovation in this country has shifted from science and technology to mobile phones and banner ads. The best and brightest are working in the wrong industry. Instead of researching alternative energy, space travel, health, etc, we're researching thinner smartphones with better battery life and more effective ways to sell ads. Makes me wonder how far along we'd be, technologically, if YouTube and Facebook had never been invented... We're just too distracted now. Maybe Fermi's Paradox can be explained by alien civilisations becoming too busy posting cat videos on Twitter to invent inter-stellar travel.

marknutter 15y ago
You really think that people aren't researching health, alternative energy, and space travel?
farsmith 15y ago
Ads aren't an end to themselves. Back in the day they made possible free TV and well funded newspapers. Now they make it possible for even better informational services to be free
cryptoz 15y ago
The entire reason that SpaceX exists, along with Tesla Motors, is that Elon Musk worked hard to figure out new ways for people to send money over the internet. He made lots of money himself, and now he creates electric cars and builds spaceships. I wouldn't worry too much. Edit: confused eBay and Paypal. Musk founded Paypal.
- laglad 15y ago
  Thanks for this point. The reason that so many intelligent and driven entrepreneurs are innovating on "less difficult" technologies is precisely because this low-hanging fruit offers a very high impact leverage right now. More people take the plunge because it costs less to start a company. Consequently, more people are working on more niche problems. This is a good thing. I'd be more concerned with improving the technical abilities of the people entering the entrepreneurial pipeline than about where they are applying themselves. Getting more technical immigrants into the USA would be a decent first step.

marknutter 15y ago

Think of all the app developers out there who are making a living off the iPhone. Think of all the web developers out there whose audience has now increased dramatically because of Facebook and iPhone getting more people to use the web. What Thiel is having a hard time with is the move to an information-centric economy. Outside of better renewable energy, we pretty much have all the bases covered for basic, comfortable human existence. It's all about the creation and dissemination of information, now.

zerostar07 15y ago
Compare that to the previous century. Where is the equivalent of the airplane, radio transmission, space travel, television, antibiotics, the Internet? Those were breakthroughs, not just incremental advances. There s never 'enough progress'. One should be an optimist though, there s innovation incubated in the life sciences
- inerte 15y ago
  Although I mostly side with Tiel on his observations, to be fair you're comparing a century to a decade. And in hindsight it is easy to tell what was a breakthrough. Remember that when computers were invented few thought that we would have them in the palms of our hands.
- jleyank 15y ago
  Hmm... I might be off by a year or two, but I think it's pretty #%!*^&% amazing that you can have a powerful computer that is a link to the world in your pocket. That was the deepest science fiction 20-30 years ago. Maybe it's due to cheap flash memory, or maybe flash memory itself. No matter, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, it would be quite nice to have alternative energy sources that were inexpensive. It would also nice to have cures for all "popular" diseases. But, compared to mucking with computers, those things cost serious money and require serious hardware. Oh, and can't be solved by "release early and release often".
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dman 15y ago

Thiel would have run out of karma if he had made the same observation on HN.

igorgue 15y ago
Good thing HN has a max of 11 downvotes (I know first hand), but I get your point, fanboyism here is strong.
- leak 15y ago
  I never knew that! This opens up so many more opportunities to comment! Thanks!
  - igorgue 15y ago
    Hah, here's the prof http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196443 (I don't think there's any more unpopular comment you can make here) see it's -4 that shows but realistically I think I had -11 downvotes (it might be -10).
    - chc 15y ago
      -4 is the lowest score a comment can achieve. Downvotes past -4 won't reduce the post's score, but they will keep draining karma from the user. I don't think there's actually a limit on that.
      - corin_ 15y ago
        Actually they will reduce the comment's score too, it just won't show. The difference is that if it is showing -4 and someone upvotes it, it won't neccesarily go to -3, because it's actual score could be much lower.
- dman 15y ago
  Are you sure? I appeared to lose a lot more than 11 per post on this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3248916 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3248916.

negrera 15y ago

Comments like this from Peter provoke people to respond. Plain and simple. Rather than criticizing why he "thinks" the iPhone hasn't broken any boundaries, maybe he should "go-out" and stimulate more than "just 500 employees" at once (aka his reference to Twitter).

mikeryan 15y ago

“Apple is an innovative company, but I think it’s mostly a design innovator.” Which is really the crux of what Apple is (I came here to say it and saw Thiel beat me to it). Apple has always been a product innovator more then a technology innovator. The iPhone was still, very much, a breakthrough device. So was the iPod but neither were "technological breakthroughs"

r00fus 15y ago

The iPhone may not a technological breakthrough in that it changes the life of billions of people, no. In that vein, neither is Paypal, to be honest. The part that annoys me is that Thiel drops this linkbait-worthy note, then doesn't qualify it by saying what would be a technological breakthrough (I did read the new yorker summary, too). Lot of hot air here.

igorgue 15y ago

Well Peter, you're part of the problem. The more you invest in e.g.: social networks the more entrepreneurs are going to follow that instead of, you know, what you call "innovation".

notahacker 15y ago
This. The best recent examples of (i) companies capturing multibillion dollar markets through timing and effective implementation of existing concepts and (ii)profit bandwagon-jumping companies with no redeeming features whatsoever I can think of are both in Thiel's portfolio. you probably know which companies I'm respectively referring to. The return that he's going to generate from Facebook and Zynga may be reinvested in exciting technologies, but in the mean time his successes offer several billion reasons for others to copy his smart bets on companies whose innovations probably won't be lauded in future centuries

tptacek 15y ago

How many iconic, break-out products are ever "technological breakthroughs"? Behind virtually every iconic product is a string of lesser known antecedents with the same fundamentals but imperfect packaging, pricing, or timing. Counterexamples? Would love to hear them. Otherwise, this is an extremely banal observation on Thiel's part.

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schandur 15y ago
How many iconic, break-out products are ever "technological breakthroughs"? Behind virtually every iconic product is a string of lesser known antecedents with the same fundamentals but imperfect packaging, pricing, or timing. Reminds me of one of the themes in the book "Blue Ocean Strategy": the importance of value innovation, where the stress is on both low cost and differentiation.
adrianwaj 15y ago
What I think you mean to say is that breakthroughs should be about discoveries leading to an expansion of mind, that has yet to be known by any individual. It's about breaking through the known, and can occur in any field of endeavour and will lead to new information: with that information a product should be created - Steve was, and Peter is looking for those products. They are in the position to do so, but neither will have that initial expansion of mind. Seems like extracting the financial wealth of a breakthrough is why investors seek them.
wallflower 15y ago
> Counterexamples? Would love to hear them. One example. PCR helped catalyze the multi-billion dollar molecular biology industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction
nirvana 15y ago
The Mac. Nobody is disputing that every product relies on previous products. But the Mac is a good example of a technological break thru that had imperfect packaging, pricing AND timing. The packaging was too restrictive for the time. Jobs' vision was right, but the industry hadn't developed far enough that you could ship a machine without internal slots and be successful. The pricing was out of line with the rest of the market, and the rest of the market didn't recognize sufficient increase in value due to the GUI to make the pricing make sense. And of course, both of those issues were issues of timing. The Mac took several years to be successful, and depending on how you measure things, some would say it has never become successful (still only being %23 of the market or something like that.) But the Mac was a technology break thru. In fact, it contained many such breakthrus, both in hardware and software.

zerostar07 15y ago

So, if you d take a stab, in what sectors do you expect to see the real breakthroughs? My bet is on genetic medicine and the brain sciences.

jleyank 15y ago
Genetic engineering is going to be a tough sell with the masses. They won't touch GM corn, tomatoes, ... How the hell are they going to accept GM-mods to themselves?
- zerostar07 15y ago
  A common characteristic of breakthroughs is that they are at first frightening
  - wallflower 15y ago
    I remember reading a Wired article that predicated GM-augmented human engineering would first gain a foothold in professional sports, namely the NFL.
    - jleyank 15y ago
      More likely something like Tour de France (O2 loading of blood)... And man, will the professional leagues have issues with this. "East German swimmers" will seem like nothing.
- Tichy 15y ago
  If they have to choose between a genetic engineering product and dying?

nostromo 15y ago

People are following the money and innovating in places where it's possible to build a business with limited capital in a short time. In other words, the consumer internet -- which is exactly where Thiel has made his money, and made investments. Unlike the average entrepreneur however, Thiel has the ability to change that, by funding more startups like SpaceX and RoboteX, and fewer like Zynga and Spotify.

SODaniel 15y ago

Pretty obvious though necessary statement it seems. None of the 'i' products have ever been about technology and Steve Jobs was never a innovator. It's all about design and consumer behavior, starting with iTunes and ending with iTunes.

wavephorm 15y ago

Smartphones affordable enough for the third world, and pervasive wireless internet access will almost definitely have a larger impact on the world than space travel ever will.

tree_of_item 15y ago
Ever? That's an incredibly strong statement. Ever is a very long time. Do you think smartphones will be more important than space travel in 300 years? What will the word "smartphone" mean then?
- wavephorm 15y ago
  I should've added 'for the foreseeable future'. Although it gives us "feel good" vibes, having a small number of people in space does not significantly improve the lives of many people.

iqster 15y ago

I'm part of the academic research community that focuses on mobile. My personal opinion is that both the iPhone and the iPad pushed the barrier of what was thought to be possible. In the case of the iPhone, it redefined browsing on small form factor devices. Yes ... pinch to zoom was published before. But the specific implementation into the web browser was pretty unique. The state of the art device prior to the iPhone was the Nokia 770 tablet. Compare that to an iPhone. W.r.t the iPad, when Jobs claimed it would last 8 hours (I think he said you could play movies the entire way on a long distance flight), I didn't believe it. Nor could other researchers I talked to. Apple's custom silicon for media playback didn't factor into people's imagination.

pjscott 15y ago
All those things are cool, but compare with airplanes, which made the world drastically smaller. Or with the Haber-Bosch process, which prevents us from starving. That's the kind of big breakthrough technology that Thiel is talking about. The iPhone, while really neat, doesn't quite measure up.
- iqster 15y ago
  One of my history professors in college said something I found quite remarkable. Let me share it ... he said in the history of humanity, there have been very few revolutions. When humans figured out how to talk was one. You can suddenly communicate with others! The other big revolution was when people learned to write. Now, you ideas can span space or time. The advent of computers, telecommunications and the Internet was another such revolution. You can now instantly connect with anyone around the planet! While the iPhone can't take the credit for all this, perhaps you see why I disagree with Thiel :)

nirvana 15y ago

The iPhone contains a key invention, and several innovations. This is the simple fact of reality. The reason these stories are constantly appearing on HN, nearly 4 years since the iPhone was introduced, is because those who want to diminish the invention of multi-touch, like everyone else, sat awed at the iPhone when it was first introduced. That was a very magical moment, and if the iPhone hadn't been a radical departure, then it would have been just another cell phone introduction. It's not often you get to see a new technology that seems magical for the first time. Theil is talking in terms of making a dent in society. Obviously his standards for a "dent in the universe" are different than Steve Jobs. That's fine for him, but don't confuse it for support for your ideology. There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone. (and every time I bring this up, some one posts a link to thin-plastic keyboards from the 1970s, or the screens of the automated ticket stand at movie theaters as if they were the same.) The technology for understanding the shape of the finger when in contact with a touch sensitive display, and being able to reduce that amorphous blob down to a single pixel-- and get the pixel the user intended to touch, instead of the one at the center, or whatever, had never been done, let alone, tracking multiple fingers at the same time, a non-trivial problem. This invention enabled a raft of innovations that Apple spent 7 years developing that resulted in only the second new user interface paradigm in my lifetime- touch UI. (The first being the GUI, which was also developed under Steve Jobs.) There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here. One manifestation of that ideology is support for things like welfare, etc, because they believe that it's just chance that separates Steve Jobs from you and me. (and not hard work.) Another manifestation of it is to pretend like the products of the mind have no value at all, and one way they like to do this is to pretend like its only "good marketing" that made the iPhone successful because it was just a random collection of parts that had been invented before. Sure, LCD screens, Mac OS X, ARM CPUs, RAM, Flash memory and lithium polymer batteries existed before, and with the exception of OS X, all had appeared in other phones. To them, that means that there's nothing innovative about the iPhone. Innovation doesn't exist in their ideology, in fact, it demolishes their ideology, so they have to pretend like nothing was invented for the iPhone. Inevitably, when anyone expresses any defense of innovation you get a lot of nonsense claims about touch panel displays int he 1970s as if that were "prior art" for multi-touch. I've even seen people on Hacker News insist that Xerox invented the GUI. (showing either they don't know what a GUI is, or they don't care.) To the extent that this ideology has succeeded in america, we have an economic depression, little growth in industry, a great shrinking in american manufacturing jobs (because this ideology has regulated them out of being competitive with the world market) etc. This ideology might even succeed to the point where a major institution of this country, enshrined in the constitution itself, is destroyed, simply because Google wants to make a competitive phone without bothering to spend 7 years coming up with something innovative itself. That would be a real shame... because the place that road leads is one where the president has a "kill switch" for the internet, things like SOPA are the law of the land, and startups have to get permission from government to operate their businesses, just like manufacturers do now, and said permission isn't going to come unless you have a lot of pull. We've seen what government control over the purse strings in an "innovative" area results in: Democratic contributors getting $500M loans from government for "green energy" only to go bust a few years later... its just a looting of the public for the direct benefit of politicians and their friends. This is the aristocracy of "pull". It's instructive to remember that Theil is a prominent libertarian, and thus very clearly not a proponent of this ideology. All this has happened before, and repeatedly. The USA is the last remaining beacon of innovation in the world. I understand that Hacker News is frequented by a lot of college age or early 20s hackers. Don't fall for the anti-innovation, anti-mind, anti-science, anti-intellectual ideology that says Apple is evil for inventing new things or putting the product and customer first, and those who just ship ripoff products are to be commended. Don't fall for the claims that inventing is useless, and that america is destined to just be like china (Where everything we make is a ripoff of something invented somewhere else.) To paraphrase Margarat Thatcher: The problem with not inventing anything yourself is, eventually you run out of other people's inventions to rip off. In fact you can see this now: The android market is commoditized. Nobody is innovating, and nobody is making any money. In fact, Apples commanding %56 of the entire phone industries profits with only %5 of the smartphones, while most phones still aren't even smartphones. (this is why android marketshare is surging, its becoming the new feature phone). This is a significant lesson for people who want to do startups. I learned it by trying to sell things on ebay when I was young: If you don't have anything unique or innovative, you can only compete on price. And that's a race to the bottom. To the extent that innovative companies can succeed, it is good for the startup economy. To the extent that anything innovative is ripped off, with no recourse, then the larger companies will maintain dominance because newer companies have nothing to compete with, and can't compete on economies of scale. The more things go that way, the less viable startups become and the less innovation society will have from which to benefit.

1010010111 15y ago

It's a design breakthrough. What's inside, the inexpensive, mass-produced components, is more or less the same as what's in all the competing devices. But the design, the packaging, is a breakthrough. What's problematic about this Apple popularism and Apple's hermetically sealed approach to selling computing devices is that it does not encourage, let alone even permit, people to learn about what's on the inside and how it works. These are computing devices, not refrigerators. And in the _grand scheme_ of things, that inhibits progress. It limits the potential pool of competitors and innovators. Though it preserves the competitive advantage of businesses like Apple, Intel and others. Increased consumer uptake fueled by elegant design certainly furthers what they can do. But the incentives for them to innovate are limited. Do the minimum. Reap the maximum. That's just smart business.

jarcoal 15y ago
It's easy to think that it does limit progress, but it likely does not. Any company that can get people to excited about technology will positively contribute to the future of the industry. It is probably an extremely controversial thought, but Apple might be responsable for pushing more people into development/engineer jobs than Linux. I know I found my passion for technology through Apple, which eventually led me to Linux. I bet I'm not alone.
- 1010010111 15y ago
  I anticipated this response. That is why I emphasize _grand scheme_. Short term, I agree with you. Long term, I do not.

danso 15y ago

Sometimes, refinement is a breakthrough. The AK-47 was not the first automatic rifle nor the most powerful or advanced. But because of its clean design and deployability, it is likely the most significant firearm in modern human history. What about those statistics that show that a relative modest reduction in consumption would do more to save the environment and energy supplies than any foreseeable technological breakthrough in the next 50 years? Any refinement of technology today to reduce consumption would likely bore someone like Thiel; at the same time, they may also do more to save the world. Why is break-out innovation not to be respected?

poppysan 15y ago

I agree that it was not a great technological breakthrough on it's own, but it is greatly responsible for a lot of folk's interest in new technology and programming among other things, which should not be understated.

ramanujan 15y ago

The fundamental reason that most innovation has occurred in the computer/internet sector over the last 40-something years is that failure is acceptable in this sector. That is, when a computer or webapp crashes it's not the end of the world. But a failure in a drug or car or power plant means serious consequences, and sometimes fatalities, and subsequent regulations/laws to make sure such things are never tried again. Now, you can make a pretty convincing argument[0] that we are as a society committing Bastiat's fallacy ("Seen vs. Unseen"), in that there are more lives lost due to not developing new drugs than there are due to failures of new drugs. The failures are seen, the lack of new drugs is not seen. However, the deeper point is that we are currently simply too wealthy as a society to tolerate the human costs (in deaths[1]) associated with rapid innovation in real world technologies. Wealth means necessities are met, but necessity is the mother of invention. This is why war and serious hardship gooses technological innovation. It's because life becomes cheaper, and test pilots and volunteers for new vaccines become more readily available. I don't think Thiel would disagree[2] with this analysis, but it does mean that the problem can't be solved simply through shifts in entrepreneurial focus. Americans simply aren't ready for the kind of messiness that real world innovation involves. [0] http://bit.ly/mtGRyv http://bit.ly/mtGRyv [1] Perhaps strangely, we are more ready to allow people to take futile risks like bungee jumping or skydiving than we are to allow people to consciously opt out of various health/safety/etc. regulations (and suffer the consequences). [2] Taking the totality of his statements in context, including the article on the Founders Fund website ("What Happened to the Future?"), Thiel and Levchin's point is not that the iPhone isn't innovative but more that there hasn't been much innovation in big areas like energy, medicine, and transportation. Indeed, by some measures we're moving backwards in those areas: the real price of energy has gone up, new drug approvals have stagnated, and top speeds have gone down since the Concorde was retired.

Mvandenbergh 15y ago
Drug trials fail all the time though, and not only because of risk aversion. If you look at the first 50 years or so of the pharmaceutical industry, there were wonder drugs being discovered every year. We may simply have exhausted a lot of the low hanging small molecule fruit. Also, if risk aversion was slowing pharma innovation then we'd see a lot of potentially efficacious compounds failing safety trials. Instead what we see is that the cost to discover candidate compounds before they're ever tested on humans.

ajkessler 15y ago

“Five hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy ? It may not be enough to dramatically improve living standards in the U.S. over the next decade or two decades.” It's strange that someone as successful as Peter Thiel has been in the startup world, a world built on providing value, would make such a statement. What does the number of permanent or semi-permanent jobs have to do with the amount of value being created by something like twitter? If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not. If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own. Also, he seems to equate increased $$ with increased living standards. By and large that's been historically true, but it's a bit misleading. Even if twitter made 0 money and created 0 jobs, it would still improve living standards. Certainly not in the way indoor plumbing or electricity raised living standards, but it still makes people's lives easier, which, by definition, improves living standards.

AlisdairO 15y ago
> If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not. > If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own. I think it depends, really. Historically, talented people have created new industries/companies that employed a lot of less talented people and allowed them to live a comfortable life. I suspect the focus of his worry is that these less talented people are nowadays less often reaping the benefits of the innovations talented people create.
- ajkessler 15y ago
  Historically, those industries required less talented people in order to stay in business. Somebody has to sell the product, answer the phones, sweep the floors, etc. If you created a company that could operate with out all of those less talented people, this would be a boon. Even if you presume all those less talented employees are mindless drones, if you can provide the same service with fewer employees, you now have all the value created by that service, plus you have all those extra mindless drones to go produce value someplace else. As to your second point, I can't imagine that's what he's really thinking. The few talented people who create the twitters, iphones, etcs, are far outnumbered by the millions of less-talented people who actually use those products.

Zarathust 15y ago

A lot of innovation we're seeing now is the result of miniaturization of older technologies, such as touchscreen, cell phones and computers. I'd say that the IPhone is rather an innovation in the lifestyle of their owners, more than a technological innovation per se. I've been arguing this point for a few years now, that smartphones are cool devices, but rather fall in the gadget category than the civilization changing techs they are sometimes compared to.

joshu 15y ago

Technological, no. UI/UX? Definitely.

gamble 15y ago

"Innovation" is a glittering generality that tech companies and their admirers feel obliged to assume, but most successful companies are built on execution rather than innovation. Apple is actually an exemplar of execution over innovation. Since Jobs returned, none of their genre-defining products have been fundamentally novel. Even the iPad represents a category people have been trying to get right for twenty years without success. Apple likes to identify markets with demand but immature products, so that they can learn from the mistakes of earlier entrants and launch with an extremely polished, market defining product. I don't hold this approach against Apple. On the contrary, I wish there were more companies that obsessed about creating polished, highly-functional products that run a little behind the technological curve, rather than the slapped-together assemblages of new parts from Asian electronics manufacturers' supply catalog that typify the industry.

sendos 15y ago

> "I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough" Isn't this essentially a strawman, since no one is claiming that the iPhone is a Technological Breakthrough? At the time the iPhone came out, lots of people noted that it actually lagged technologically behind its smartphone peers (no 3G, subpar SMS functionality, etc), which was correct. And yet it won, it showed smartphone companies how to make a smartphone, and they have been copying that design/approach ever since. The iPhone didn't win because it was a technological breakthrough, and everyone in tech knows this, so I'm not sure why Thiel's comment is that noteworthy.

sehugg 15y ago

The App Store and VoiceOver. The former shifted the power balance between devs and carriers (creating thousands of jobs) and the latter has changed the lives of many visually-impaired. I understand the iPhone ref is a strawman, but not a very good one.

andyl 15y ago

Lots of comments here defending Apple. I think the relevant question is: why don't we see more innovation in energy, transportation or medicine?

shn 15y ago

I am totally disagree. Although the breakthroughs in the tech scene are not as groundbreaking as it seems, the implications for social interaction, commerce and education is astounding. I believe we are yet to see the fruits of internet and related technologies in the years ahead of us. Khan Academy, Stanford's online classes, and tons of other educational material available through internet I believe effecting a lot of people's lives.

loup-vaillant 15y ago

> Having a fully functioning computer in your pocket opens up entirely new experiences—and markets. […] Social media, combined with mobile technologies, are powering protests and revolutions around the world and changing the way people consume information. While I somewhat agree with this, I can't help but feel that much more is possible[1]. With current technology. If people actually owned their pocket computers, both in theory[2] and in practice[3], the changes would be much more profound. [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/2c/a_sense_that_more_is_possible http://lesswrong.com/lw/2c/a_sense_that_more_is_possible [2] http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ [3] http://vpri.org/ http://vpri.org/ http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf