5 ms·

The Fading Of Silicon Valley Innovation

37 points by mactitan 14y ago

dragonbonheur 14y ago
There's an obvious cause for that: blogger hipsters using only closed down iDevices , thus unable to see beyond the Apple walled garden and hipster geeks using only closed down iDevices only to get the rug swept from under their feet by Apple when they innovate too much. As if nobody ever saw the numerous "Apple kicked me out of their store" sob stories on HN. Switch to PC and Android, there's much to do.
api 14y ago
The Valley today strikes me as more of a Hollywood North, a media and marketing center, rather than an innovation center. Most new Valley ventures I see (Pinterest anyone?) strike me more as "web media productions" than tech ventures. There's no new technology there. Google seems to be the last tech innovator in the valley with the Goggles, self-driving cars, etc. I really see Google as the last actual technology company to come out of the tech boom of the 1990s. There hasn't been much since, at least not in the Valley. Further South you have Tesla and SpaceX, and you have some ventures elsewhere.
- mactitan 14y ago
  "media productions..." the stuff that can be done on the cheap by: (Somewhere, tinkerers in a garage are producing the first highly inefficient specimens of the next Big Thing. But where – and what? ) - from article - "what" will happen but will it happen in the valley? Will we ever have a major advance in SW development? If so I think it will require massive research & resources: perhaps somewhere in asia.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  I think yours is the best explanation I've seen in this thread. It's not that innovation has stopped, but rather that it has been focused in a very narrow niche as of late: the advertising niche. Everyone seems to be doing something in advertising, whether it's brokering ads or harvesting eyeballs. Most of these seem to be in the perennially doomed space of "we will invent something unrelated to advertising and try to shoehorn an ad-based business model into it". This is also why when a not-ad-related web business starts up we fall all over ourselves - AirBnb, Square, etc.
- pg 14y ago
  You're falling victim to a common mistake people make when they rely on anecdotal evidence to answer this question. Consumer apps by their nature are more popular, and you're thus more likely to have heard of them.
  - mgummelt 14y ago
    Any debate about "technology" will devolve into definitions, but here's a (possibly incomplete) list of top private IT for anyone that wants to draw their own conclusions: http://www.businessinsider.com/2012-digital-100?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/2012-digital-100?op=1 Since most of these are e-commerce, social networks, media, and advertising companies, I'm not convinced we're doing a good job making new technology.
- rhc2104 14y ago
  Tesla's headquarters is in Palo Alto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors
- sunnybythesea 14y ago
  Here is a list of some notable shops in SV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Notable_companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Notable_companie...
kstenerud 14y ago
This article could just as easily have been written in the late 1990s, and would have been just as accurate. Technology becomes commoditized. It happened to steam engines, it happened to cars, it happened to PCs and it's happening to phones and tablets today. But it's a huge leap of faith to take that process and boldly state "Silicon Valley innovation will fade like the steam engine."
- mactitan 14y ago
  Innovation will continue but what? How about biotech having the most potential? Where? in the valley or asia (where there's a growing mass of scientists) As things commoditize it seems design would shift to less costly areas.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    Biotech's big area is Boston.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I guess that people who are living with change can't see it clearly. Whenever someone tells me "we're not innovating any more" I suggest they try a simple exercise; Revert your life to the standard it had at the 'end' of the innovation period (this guy would have to go back to 2000). Remove all of the things you couldn't do then, today. Convert your utilities to the same that you had then (for many that would mean going back to dial up Internet but I digress). Now spend a week in that life, come back and tell me that innovation has stopped since then. Fundamentally, people seem to start 'seeing' innovation in their teens, which seems to be coming out of everything, and then by the time they hit their 30's they stop seeing it. My thesis is that it isn't because innovation and change has stopped happening, it is because they have become accustomed to it. Hence the exercise to 'see' what you couldn't see because you were in the middle of it.
- moocow01 14y ago
  I sort of agree but I think the danger with your exercise as it pertains to this article is that it takes into account everything - not just tech. My washing machine is way better, car runs longer, better medications, etc. I think in terms of traditional Silicon Valley tech (as it is today) his point is largely correct and natural. While software is increasingly ubiquitous, the pace/rate at which its able to be a driver of new innovation/change is increasingly less in my opinion - computing and the internet has been maturing over the last 50 years and we should expect to see less life altering changes as a whole. It doesn't mean the gig is up - it just means computing progress is now eating away at the fringes and that the delta in how much computing drives innovation will be somewhat less through 2010-2020 than it was from 2000-2010.
- rayiner 14y ago
  The article is talking about Silicon Valley specifically. So play with the parameters of your hypothetical a little bit: would you be willing to give up everything Silicon Valley has come up with in the last 10 years? High speed internet, 4G, etc, isn't Silicon Valley. It's Japan (DoCoMo), San Diego (Qualcomm), Dallas (AT&T), New Jersey (Verizon), etc. No need to give up your Ivy Bridge CPU's (Portland/Haifa). Google was in place before 2002, and basically peaked at that time. What would I be giving up? Facebook? Flash ads? Done! Go back to Photoshop 7.x? Even if you assert that Microsoft is more culturally associated with the Valley, despite being in Redmond, then you might be running Windows 2000 on your new Ivy Bridge processor. Sounds great! The hardest thing to give up would be my iPhone (Cupertino) and I guess Hacker News. Although Apple is arguably the last vestige of the "old" Silicon Valley. Think about it: they're basically making their money these days selling cool-looking RISC machines running UNIX...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
BobWarfield 14y ago
Oh golly, a PermaBear blog. That's going to be upbeat now isn't it? The trouble with Eeyore's and Chicken Little's is they are always right. That is they become right if you wait long enough and then they are only right for a short time. That brief window is when they perk up all happy and smiling and point out, "Hey, you should've listened, I was right." Never mind the opportunity cost of waiting for the right timing. It's a good thing the stock market charges interest on a short position so that there is a cost to not being right NOW. With that aside, the Consumer Internet focus has resulted in tremendously less innovation in recent years. I've worked for 6 VC funded startups including 3 I founded. Not one of them could be funded today because they were all started with a slide show and a team. The VC's of today want a product, happy customers, and even momentum before they put much in. It's literally harder to do much within that window. See my post: http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/you-cant-do-crp-with-a-750k-seed-round-in-enterprise-saas-so-dont-even-try/ http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/you-cant-do-crp-w... OTOH, it is possible to bootstrap like never before. Maybe there's innovation to be had there. And there is talk of the VC's going back to Enterprise. We'll see if anything big gets built or if they focus on the consumerization of IT (aka more Consumer Internet sold B2B).
- mactitan 14y ago
  Well, they were warning of the dot com and the mortgage bubbles before they happened. Now they are warning of the gov bond bubble (seems like a good chance). 3 of 3 wont be bad avg. But I do say if capital isn't funneled to the valley (VC's) there will be less startups. (Do we need reckless money printing to get new ideas/companies?....maybe so
michaelochurch 14y ago
He's conflating an industry with a geographic location. In the 1960s, "Silicon Valley" was dominated by big companies. Now it's overrun with dipshit social media concerns that won't last 10 years. It was a different thing altogether in 1975 and in 1999. In 2030, two questions are: * What will be the geographic center of innovation? * What industry will the innovation be in? These are orthogonal. I can't answer either of these. I honestly have no clue. I'll make one solid prediction, though: I don't know what the Big Thing of 2030 will be, but it will involve computation. It'll be far outside of traditional IT (the use of computers to implement 20th-century business ideas) and social media (same, but for 21st-century cultural experiments) but whatever is Big during 2030 will require a lot of skill when it comes to computation. Of course, I have no idea whether this will happen in Northern California or some other corner of the world. What I think is clear is that VC-istan innovation is over. The problem is that the VCs talk to each other and collectively decide who's hot and who's not. So, instead of getting true risk-taking, you have selection by committee in the funding process. That is starting to fail.
- BobWarfield 14y ago
  "VC-istan innovation is over" Maybe. Much as I'd like to believe it, there are some things that can't be bootstrapped. Actually there are many things. We just don't do them because the VC's aren't funding them either. Perhaps they'll go back to it. OTOH, VC access is one big reason innovation gets centralized to places like Silicon Valley. Reduce that friction and it can spread out more. Still doesn't fix the issue of networking for talent which is another network effect that clumps innovation. I did my first startup in Houston, Texas. It was great. Extremely cheap. Built a product and got to profitability on about $600K of capital. Moved the company to Silicon Valley before ultimately selling it to Borland (it became Quattro Pro). Houston worked for development because I could get talent out of Rice University and Univ. of Houston. Infrastructure was cheap because they were having a real estate crunch at the time. You could get free rent for 2 years in exchange for signing a 5 year lease. What was hard was the marketing and networking. After riding planes to go to the East and West Coasts to get the product reviewed, I decided we had to move the company. In the Internet age, that may be a lot less true. No particular advantage to doing my current bootstrap (CNCCookbook) in Silicon Valley other than that's where I live. Houston would be a lot cheaper.
krschultz 14y ago
Wait, between 1869 and 1950 there was no innovation in steam? Between 1960 and today there has been no innovation in automobiles? What?
- leoc 14y ago
  Yes, the kaizen and just-in-time revolutions were centred in the post-'60s automobile industry, were they not?
tumanian 14y ago
The author seems to be mixing two concerns into one - the innovation in infrastructure and the innovation in products. While a breakthrough in infrastructure seems less likely( the hardware and the infrastructure of the information systems have stabilized at this point) there are more products and niches where addition of information processing capacity will lead to innovative results. In that sense the comparison of silicon valley to auto industry does not seem to be justified. Auto industry is producing a well defined product, while modern SV allows application of a commodity across all industries, just like electricity. Current generation of electric cars are as innovative as steam engines during industrial revolution.
pedalpete 14y ago
I think this article is looking at markets from the wrong perspective. First of all the author discusses Silicon Valley innovation vs. the steam engine and the automobile. Assuming 'Silicon Valley' is being used to equal 'technology', the author is comparing a market to a product. Now, if the author had compared innovation in transportation (automobile) to innovation in energy (steam power), to innovation in technology, they'd be on to something. Except that the thesis falls down when making this comparison. Sure the automobile was a massive shift in transportation technology, but that was followed up by the airplane, high-speed trains, massive public rail systems, etc. etc. There is still constant innovation in all of these fields, but could you imagine what the world would be like if we had a new form of transportation created every 10 years? I don't think the world would be able to keep up.
spiritplumber 14y ago
Hey, I live in San Rafael and I invent stuff :P see my robots, they're everywhere. there's still some hardware being designed over there, in addition to us there's Inertia Labs and Calbay only in a 10 mile radius from my place. Although that's the north bay I guess... maybe you have a point.
AnthonyMouse 14y ago
I don't buy it. The internet isn't the steam engine. The internet is electricity. And we haven't even seen the end of the that revolution yet. The key point is that the author is comparing decades in other industries to years in this industry. Which we're apt to accept because we see things moving so much faster now. But some things don't move that fast. The reason we see such rapid innovation in this industry is that the low barriers to entry facilitate massive parallelism: There are a million teams implementing a million ideas all at once. But parallelism doesn't resolve dependencies. You can't invent something until its time has come, all the prerequisites have to be there first. And the big things tend to have a lot of dependencies -- because otherwise they would have been done twenty years ago. This party is just getting started.
dasil003 14y ago
Contrary to most comments here I think it's a pretty interesting article, much better than the usual VC/blogger whining pieces we've been lately. There are some real parallels there. I think where these analogies break down is the fact that computing has much wider applications even than something as fundamental as transportation. Well, necessarily so because computing can be applied to transportation and everything else. What "Silicon Valley" does is applicable everywhere for the foreseeable future. I mean software is certainly not a solved problem and it really won't be until the singularity is achieved.
bicknergseng 14y ago
Just because people are continuing to commercialize mobile and internet doesn't mean that groundbreaking innovation has stopped in other places... it just means that the internet and mobile will not be the location of an unexpected groundbreaking innovation. We were't printing DNA or 3D models in our homes 10 years ago. Expect something from those in the next 10.
tlogan 14y ago
Interesting article. Or related topic, are there any SV startups working on quantum computers (or just something which that has some of the quantum mechanical properties needed for quantum computing)?
- eoinmurray92 14y ago
  Groups like Toshiba at cambridge and EPN at Tyndall are doing a lot into quantum key distribution and generating suitable photons for quantum based logic (https://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/crl/qig/quantumkeyserver.html https://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/crl/qig/quantumkeyse..., http://www.tyndall.ie/content/research-4 http://www.tyndall.ie/content/research-4), but commercial quantum computing is still a way of, currently the most promising methods for doing quantum logic are still at the optical lab bench stage, that being said a lot is known about the problems ahead and how to solve them, I don't know much about non-photonic approaches like Isaac Chaungs group at MIT which seem to have a lot of merit (http://web.mit.edu/~cua/www/quanta/ http://web.mit.edu/~cua/www/quanta/).
bsaunder 14y ago
I think we are seeing the beginning of innovation from Silicon Valley. We are just starting to apply computers to everyday life. We've largely tackled communications. The next things seem to be more interactions between the real and digital worlds (which self-driving cars seem to be an early example of). 3D printing (and the things it enables) and more widespread robotics seem like obvious next innovations.

37 points by mactitan 14y ago

There's an obvious cause for that: blogger hipsters using only closed down iDevices , thus unable to see beyond the Apple walled garden and hipster geeks using only closed down iDevices only to get the rug swept from under their feet by Apple when they innovate too much. As if nobody ever saw the numerous "Apple kicked me out of their store" sob stories on HN. Switch to PC and Android, there's much to do.

api 14y ago

The Valley today strikes me as more of a Hollywood North, a media and marketing center, rather than an innovation center. Most new Valley ventures I see (Pinterest anyone?) strike me more as "web media productions" than tech ventures. There's no new technology there. Google seems to be the last tech innovator in the valley with the Goggles, self-driving cars, etc. I really see Google as the last actual technology company to come out of the tech boom of the 1990s. There hasn't been much since, at least not in the Valley. Further South you have Tesla and SpaceX, and you have some ventures elsewhere.

mactitan 14y ago
"media productions..." the stuff that can be done on the cheap by: (Somewhere, tinkerers in a garage are producing the first highly inefficient specimens of the next Big Thing. But where – and what? ) - from article - "what" will happen but will it happen in the valley? Will we ever have a major advance in SW development? If so I think it will require massive research & resources: perhaps somewhere in asia.
potatolicious 14y ago
I think yours is the best explanation I've seen in this thread. It's not that innovation has stopped, but rather that it has been focused in a very narrow niche as of late: the advertising niche. Everyone seems to be doing something in advertising, whether it's brokering ads or harvesting eyeballs. Most of these seem to be in the perennially doomed space of "we will invent something unrelated to advertising and try to shoehorn an ad-based business model into it". This is also why when a not-ad-related web business starts up we fall all over ourselves - AirBnb, Square, etc.
pg 14y ago
You're falling victim to a common mistake people make when they rely on anecdotal evidence to answer this question. Consumer apps by their nature are more popular, and you're thus more likely to have heard of them.
- mgummelt 14y ago
  Any debate about "technology" will devolve into definitions, but here's a (possibly incomplete) list of top private IT for anyone that wants to draw their own conclusions: http://www.businessinsider.com/2012-digital-100?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/2012-digital-100?op=1 Since most of these are e-commerce, social networks, media, and advertising companies, I'm not convinced we're doing a good job making new technology.
rhc2104 14y ago
Tesla's headquarters is in Palo Alto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors
sunnybythesea 14y ago
Here is a list of some notable shops in SV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Notable_companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Notable_companie...

kstenerud 14y ago

This article could just as easily have been written in the late 1990s, and would have been just as accurate. Technology becomes commoditized. It happened to steam engines, it happened to cars, it happened to PCs and it's happening to phones and tablets today. But it's a huge leap of faith to take that process and boldly state "Silicon Valley innovation will fade like the steam engine."

mactitan 14y ago
Innovation will continue but what? How about biotech having the most potential? Where? in the valley or asia (where there's a growing mass of scientists) As things commoditize it seems design would shift to less costly areas.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  Biotech's big area is Boston.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I guess that people who are living with change can't see it clearly. Whenever someone tells me "we're not innovating any more" I suggest they try a simple exercise; Revert your life to the standard it had at the 'end' of the innovation period (this guy would have to go back to 2000). Remove all of the things you couldn't do then, today. Convert your utilities to the same that you had then (for many that would mean going back to dial up Internet but I digress). Now spend a week in that life, come back and tell me that innovation has stopped since then. Fundamentally, people seem to start 'seeing' innovation in their teens, which seems to be coming out of everything, and then by the time they hit their 30's they stop seeing it. My thesis is that it isn't because innovation and change has stopped happening, it is because they have become accustomed to it. Hence the exercise to 'see' what you couldn't see because you were in the middle of it.

moocow01 14y ago
I sort of agree but I think the danger with your exercise as it pertains to this article is that it takes into account everything - not just tech. My washing machine is way better, car runs longer, better medications, etc. I think in terms of traditional Silicon Valley tech (as it is today) his point is largely correct and natural. While software is increasingly ubiquitous, the pace/rate at which its able to be a driver of new innovation/change is increasingly less in my opinion - computing and the internet has been maturing over the last 50 years and we should expect to see less life altering changes as a whole. It doesn't mean the gig is up - it just means computing progress is now eating away at the fringes and that the delta in how much computing drives innovation will be somewhat less through 2010-2020 than it was from 2000-2010.
rayiner 14y ago
The article is talking about Silicon Valley specifically. So play with the parameters of your hypothetical a little bit: would you be willing to give up everything Silicon Valley has come up with in the last 10 years? High speed internet, 4G, etc, isn't Silicon Valley. It's Japan (DoCoMo), San Diego (Qualcomm), Dallas (AT&T), New Jersey (Verizon), etc. No need to give up your Ivy Bridge CPU's (Portland/Haifa). Google was in place before 2002, and basically peaked at that time. What would I be giving up? Facebook? Flash ads? Done! Go back to Photoshop 7.x? Even if you assert that Microsoft is more culturally associated with the Valley, despite being in Redmond, then you might be running Windows 2000 on your new Ivy Bridge processor. Sounds great! The hardest thing to give up would be my iPhone (Cupertino) and I guess Hacker News. Although Apple is arguably the last vestige of the "old" Silicon Valley. Think about it: they're basically making their money these days selling cool-looking RISC machines running UNIX...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

BobWarfield 14y ago

Oh golly, a PermaBear blog. That's going to be upbeat now isn't it? The trouble with Eeyore's and Chicken Little's is they are always right. That is they become right if you wait long enough and then they are only right for a short time. That brief window is when they perk up all happy and smiling and point out, "Hey, you should've listened, I was right." Never mind the opportunity cost of waiting for the right timing. It's a good thing the stock market charges interest on a short position so that there is a cost to not being right NOW. With that aside, the Consumer Internet focus has resulted in tremendously less innovation in recent years. I've worked for 6 VC funded startups including 3 I founded. Not one of them could be funded today because they were all started with a slide show and a team. The VC's of today want a product, happy customers, and even momentum before they put much in. It's literally harder to do much within that window. See my post: http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/you-cant-do-crp-with-a-750k-seed-round-in-enterprise-saas-so-dont-even-try/ http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/you-cant-do-crp-w... OTOH, it is possible to bootstrap like never before. Maybe there's innovation to be had there. And there is talk of the VC's going back to Enterprise. We'll see if anything big gets built or if they focus on the consumerization of IT (aka more Consumer Internet sold B2B).

mactitan 14y ago
Well, they were warning of the dot com and the mortgage bubbles before they happened. Now they are warning of the gov bond bubble (seems like a good chance). 3 of 3 wont be bad avg. But I do say if capital isn't funneled to the valley (VC's) there will be less startups. (Do we need reckless money printing to get new ideas/companies?....maybe so

michaelochurch 14y ago

He's conflating an industry with a geographic location. In the 1960s, "Silicon Valley" was dominated by big companies. Now it's overrun with dipshit social media concerns that won't last 10 years. It was a different thing altogether in 1975 and in 1999. In 2030, two questions are: * What will be the geographic center of innovation? * What industry will the innovation be in? These are orthogonal. I can't answer either of these. I honestly have no clue. I'll make one solid prediction, though: I don't know what the Big Thing of 2030 will be, but it will involve computation. It'll be far outside of traditional IT (the use of computers to implement 20th-century business ideas) and social media (same, but for 21st-century cultural experiments) but whatever is Big during 2030 will require a lot of skill when it comes to computation. Of course, I have no idea whether this will happen in Northern California or some other corner of the world. What I think is clear is that VC-istan innovation is over. The problem is that the VCs talk to each other and collectively decide who's hot and who's not. So, instead of getting true risk-taking, you have selection by committee in the funding process. That is starting to fail.

BobWarfield 14y ago
"VC-istan innovation is over" Maybe. Much as I'd like to believe it, there are some things that can't be bootstrapped. Actually there are many things. We just don't do them because the VC's aren't funding them either. Perhaps they'll go back to it. OTOH, VC access is one big reason innovation gets centralized to places like Silicon Valley. Reduce that friction and it can spread out more. Still doesn't fix the issue of networking for talent which is another network effect that clumps innovation. I did my first startup in Houston, Texas. It was great. Extremely cheap. Built a product and got to profitability on about $600K of capital. Moved the company to Silicon Valley before ultimately selling it to Borland (it became Quattro Pro). Houston worked for development because I could get talent out of Rice University and Univ. of Houston. Infrastructure was cheap because they were having a real estate crunch at the time. You could get free rent for 2 years in exchange for signing a 5 year lease. What was hard was the marketing and networking. After riding planes to go to the East and West Coasts to get the product reviewed, I decided we had to move the company. In the Internet age, that may be a lot less true. No particular advantage to doing my current bootstrap (CNCCookbook) in Silicon Valley other than that's where I live. Houston would be a lot cheaper.

krschultz 14y ago

Wait, between 1869 and 1950 there was no innovation in steam? Between 1960 and today there has been no innovation in automobiles? What?

leoc 14y ago
Yes, the kaizen and just-in-time revolutions were centred in the post-'60s automobile industry, were they not?

tumanian 14y ago

The author seems to be mixing two concerns into one - the innovation in infrastructure and the innovation in products. While a breakthrough in infrastructure seems less likely( the hardware and the infrastructure of the information systems have stabilized at this point) there are more products and niches where addition of information processing capacity will lead to innovative results. In that sense the comparison of silicon valley to auto industry does not seem to be justified. Auto industry is producing a well defined product, while modern SV allows application of a commodity across all industries, just like electricity. Current generation of electric cars are as innovative as steam engines during industrial revolution.

pedalpete 14y ago

I think this article is looking at markets from the wrong perspective. First of all the author discusses Silicon Valley innovation vs. the steam engine and the automobile. Assuming 'Silicon Valley' is being used to equal 'technology', the author is comparing a market to a product. Now, if the author had compared innovation in transportation (automobile) to innovation in energy (steam power), to innovation in technology, they'd be on to something. Except that the thesis falls down when making this comparison. Sure the automobile was a massive shift in transportation technology, but that was followed up by the airplane, high-speed trains, massive public rail systems, etc. etc. There is still constant innovation in all of these fields, but could you imagine what the world would be like if we had a new form of transportation created every 10 years? I don't think the world would be able to keep up.

spiritplumber 14y ago

Hey, I live in San Rafael and I invent stuff :P see my robots, they're everywhere. there's still some hardware being designed over there, in addition to us there's Inertia Labs and Calbay only in a 10 mile radius from my place. Although that's the north bay I guess... maybe you have a point.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago

I don't buy it. The internet isn't the steam engine. The internet is electricity. And we haven't even seen the end of the that revolution yet. The key point is that the author is comparing decades in other industries to years in this industry. Which we're apt to accept because we see things moving so much faster now. But some things don't move that fast. The reason we see such rapid innovation in this industry is that the low barriers to entry facilitate massive parallelism: There are a million teams implementing a million ideas all at once. But parallelism doesn't resolve dependencies. You can't invent something until its time has come, all the prerequisites have to be there first. And the big things tend to have a lot of dependencies -- because otherwise they would have been done twenty years ago. This party is just getting started.

dasil003 14y ago

Contrary to most comments here I think it's a pretty interesting article, much better than the usual VC/blogger whining pieces we've been lately. There are some real parallels there. I think where these analogies break down is the fact that computing has much wider applications even than something as fundamental as transportation. Well, necessarily so because computing can be applied to transportation and everything else. What "Silicon Valley" does is applicable everywhere for the foreseeable future. I mean software is certainly not a solved problem and it really won't be until the singularity is achieved.

bicknergseng 14y ago

Just because people are continuing to commercialize mobile and internet doesn't mean that groundbreaking innovation has stopped in other places... it just means that the internet and mobile will not be the location of an unexpected groundbreaking innovation. We were't printing DNA or 3D models in our homes 10 years ago. Expect something from those in the next 10.

tlogan 14y ago

Interesting article. Or related topic, are there any SV startups working on quantum computers (or just something which that has some of the quantum mechanical properties needed for quantum computing)?

eoinmurray92 14y ago
Groups like Toshiba at cambridge and EPN at Tyndall are doing a lot into quantum key distribution and generating suitable photons for quantum based logic (https://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/crl/qig/quantumkeyserver.html https://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/crl/qig/quantumkeyse..., http://www.tyndall.ie/content/research-4 http://www.tyndall.ie/content/research-4), but commercial quantum computing is still a way of, currently the most promising methods for doing quantum logic are still at the optical lab bench stage, that being said a lot is known about the problems ahead and how to solve them, I don't know much about non-photonic approaches like Isaac Chaungs group at MIT which seem to have a lot of merit (http://web.mit.edu/~cua/www/quanta/ http://web.mit.edu/~cua/www/quanta/).

bsaunder 14y ago

I think we are seeing the beginning of innovation from Silicon Valley. We are just starting to apply computers to everyday life. We've largely tackled communications. The next things seem to be more interactions between the real and digital worlds (which self-driving cars seem to be an early example of). 3D printing (and the things it enables) and more widespread robotics seem like obvious next innovations.