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The sad truth about Facebook

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Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#41

Post by anigbrowl »

iamelgringo wrote: post #6

Complete poppycock. Running Hackers and Founders SV, I think I have a pretty decent picture of what Silicon Valley is like on the ground floor, and as far as I'm concerned it's pretty frigging amazing. There's tons of small teams doing amazing things with Big Data and real time analytics like Factual (making Open Data easier to manage and use), MixPanel (Real Time analytics for applications). There's a number of comp…

Twitter...invented an entirely new communications protocol

Um...

Zynga...bigger economy than many developing nations

Possibly true. I admire the business acumen of both firms and think they have scaled their services quite effectively. But how productive are they? I mean, I remember seeing stockbrokers and lawyers standing in line at 8am to buy limited edition Beanie Babies because they were considered a smart investment.

You make several good points but I agree with the other posters questioning the degree of value creation taking place.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#42

Post by nadam »

Maybe this article is a PR piece. But I agree with that 'social' and non technology-focused startup ideas are overvalued currently by young enterpreneurs, by the media and by investors. As if those problems which existed 10-20 years ago would not exist anymore. As if those problems currently solved by 'old companies' and generating incredible amount of money, could not be solved better by some startups. Not enough startups are competing _directly_ against those old products like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc... Not enough young companies are based on deep technology. Almost everyone want to be rich quickly adding very little technology-wise to exisitng open-source stuff like Ruby on Rails. To use Zed's terminology I am half a 'long beard' half a 'product guy'. So I am trying to create something which is a product for people, but potentially can go quite deep technology-wise.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#43

Post by prodigal_erik »

paraschopra wrote: post #39
Aetius wrote: post #2

Yeah, it would be easier innovate on hard problems, Mr. Myhrvold, if you you weren't trying to strangle startups and small tech firms every chance you get with your Intellectual Ventures .

I'm not sure, but is his company every sued any startup for patent infringement. I read about his company in super-Freakonomics and he seemed to be genuinely caring about solving hard, big problems. He may be amassing patents to get protection but unless he actively screws small companies by buying patents, I'm not sure I would call his company a patent troll.

They create and acquire patents for revenue, not defense. They don't need protection from infringement suits because they don't sell any products (and their research should fall within US patent law's exemption for that purpose). There's also speculation they have backed some infringement suits raised by shell companies.

I'm torn. There ought to be some way to compensate researchers for actually solving hard problems (here I'm excluding a lot of poorly-examined software patents which basically claim the whole problem via the obvious solution) yet doesn't involve giving them an exclusive stranglehold on anyone using their work even accidentally.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#44

Post by DamonOehlman »

I'm sure that the message of both the movie and this spin-off piece are skewed towards fantasy and there is great work coming out of SV all the time.

But let's face it innovation doesn't decide to shack up in one place, settle down and have a couple of kids, calling one place home for the rest of it's existence.

Hubs of both engineering and social innovation will dwarf SV in coming years. The only question is where...

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#46

Post by [deleted] »

seldo wrote: post #40

Twitter is a noisy circus of spats and celebrity watching, and its hapless founders still can’t figure out how to make money. Anybody who says this is clearly just trolling, since everyone knows they are making a ton of money selling the data to the search engines before they even get started on the advertising, which they are working on. And as for "twitter is for celebrity watching", that meme died a year ago.

[deleted]

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#47

Post by dillydally »

anigbrowl wrote: post #41
iamelgringo wrote: post #6

Complete poppycock. Running Hackers and Founders SV, I think I have a pretty decent picture of what Silicon Valley is like on the ground floor, and as far as I'm concerned it's pretty frigging amazing. There's tons of small teams doing amazing things with Big Data and real time analytics like Factual (making Open Data easier to manage and use), MixPanel (Real Time analytics for applications). There's a number of comp…

Twitter...invented an entirely new communications protocol Um... Zynga...bigger economy than many developing nations Possibly true. I admire the business acumen of both firms and think they have scaled their services quite effectively. But how productive are they? I mean, I remember seeing stockbrokers and lawyers standing in line at 8am to buy limited edition Beanie Babies because they were considered a smart invest…

How "productive" was Electronic Arts? It's from the same class as Adobe, etc.

Computers aren't just for spreadsheets.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#48

Post by tapp »

“If we distract people with the lure of easy money... we’re going to wind up derailing the thing that has been driving our economy”

It seems to me that if one were sincerely worried about this, the concern would be better directed at Wall Street, where many of the world's best minds go to be wasted on creating the next CDO or HFT/computerized-frontrunning technique while contributing nothing back to the world.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#49

Post by chegra »

felipe wrote: post #27
iamelgringo wrote: post #6

Complete poppycock. Running Hackers and Founders SV, I think I have a pretty decent picture of what Silicon Valley is like on the ground floor, and as far as I'm concerned it's pretty frigging amazing. There's tons of small teams doing amazing things with Big Data and real time analytics like Factual (making Open Data easier to manage and use), MixPanel (Real Time analytics for applications). There's a number of comp…

The point of the article is that Silicon Valley used to be focused on hardcore infrastructure like semiconductors, networking, operational systems. Note that almost all companies you mentioned are related to either marketing, media or entertainment. Even Factual, their main customers are media-related.

What I think people are refering to is Technical Risk vs. Market Risk. Before Silicon Valley companies were working on stuff they don't know will work but if they did, they were basically guaranteed customers, Technical Risk.

For instance building a faster circuit, a startup whose goal is achieve such a mission has no way of knowing whether it would work, but if it did work there would be tons of people buying.

Lately, people are working on stuff with market risk. Stuff that are market risk tend to be well understood technically, but there is no guarantee that people will buy. For instance a Facebook clone, the chances are slim that people will move from Facebook to this new web application but there is no doubt on whether someone can build it.

Technical Risk generally has the property, if you can build, they would come. Market Risk generally has the property, everybody will build it, more than likely nobody will come[except to one or two].

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#50

Post by iamelgringo »

timr wrote: post #34
iamelgringo wrote: post #6

Complete poppycock. Running Hackers and Founders SV, I think I have a pretty decent picture of what Silicon Valley is like on the ground floor, and as far as I'm concerned it's pretty frigging amazing. There's tons of small teams doing amazing things with Big Data and real time analytics like Factual (making Open Data easier to manage and use), MixPanel (Real Time analytics for applications). There's a number of comp…

Yeah, this is one of those debates that's going to generate a lot of heat, but not much light. Because, frankly, for every guy who thinks that it's a crime that the valley isn't 95% about battery technology and semiconductor startups, there's a guy who wants to breathlessly pronounce Twitter a "new communications protocol" (Twitter is a web service -- it uses the same protocols as everyone else on the web -- and it's…

I certainly understand and respect that these technologies are uninteresting to you.

At the same time in the past month, I've talked with government officials from 2 fairly developed countries, because they are trying to learn what makes Silicon Valley tick. In both cases, they understand that they will never be able to compete with Silicon Valley, but at very least, they want to cross pollinate their technology sector with ours.

I noticed that your profile says that you work at Yelp. I'd respectfully suggest that I haven't seen tons of interesting R&D happen up in San Francisco. There are an inordinate number of social media companies and iPhone app companies up at the tip of the peninsula. But, I tend to hang out in Mt View, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Palo Alto, and there's a much different flavor to the companies down here.

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