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This Tech Bubble Is Different

businessweek.com

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Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different

#21

Post by genera »

bad_user wrote: post #11

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads Best minds of any generation have always thought about ways to make money. That doesn't mean that the world doesn't benefit from side-effects. Information is at your fingertips because of companies like Google and Yahoo. Staying connected is easier then before because of companies like Facebook and Twitter. And speaking about infrastructu…

>Best minds of any generation have always thought about ways to make money.

Yeah, but sometimes it comes from developing technology that sends people to the moon. Or technology that reduced a roomful of vacuum tube computer technology to a chip the size of your fingernail. Or finding ways to mass-produce cheap chip-based computers affordable my hundreds of millions of people... You know, stuff that actually kinda matters, and can improve people's lives.

Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different

#22

Post by aksbhat »

"Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. 'That sucks.'"

I loved this quote, I also had a similar experience. In past I had an internship in a similar role and pursued few projects on mining communities in large social networks. However luckily I got an amazing opportunity of working at med school/hospital affiliated with my university. I now apply similar algorithms, but now I help radiologists and physicians.

Lets hope that in future the methods that are developed for optimizing ad clicks could probably be useful in some other field. E.g. how IBM is now planning to use Watson in healthcare. My guess is that a lot of algorithm used in developing Watson, were developed for ranking Ads. Closer home, I use a 55 node Hadoop cluster for processing 19 Million annotated PubMed abstracts.

Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different

#24

Post by 6ren »

strlen wrote: post #10

I sympathize with this view, but the very example given contradicts the thesis that this bubble will leave no technology in its wake. Hadoop was developed at Yahoo, an advertising supported company. Some of the most interesting contributions (HDFS sync, RaidNode, AvatarNode) have come from Facebook, an ad supported company. Hadoop's architecture itself is inspired by the MapReduce and GFS papers from Google, another…

A nice thing about Google is that its interests have been aligned with the public good: more internet access, more websites, more blogs, more webapps. (Their interests are now diverging a bit, as they try to extract more personal information. Facebook did a nice trick where people actively give them their personal information...)

Not sure if the alignment is as deep for Facebook - more people with internet benefits them, but does more internet content?

Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different

#25

Post by swombat »

You gotta be kidding me. Social media will leave nothing behind? How about a communications infrastructure spanning the whole world and connecting people to both friends and other people of interest in real-time, no matter where they are (in the bus, in the street, at home, at their computer), enabling the most rapid spread of information ever seen, and potentially enabling the world to start functioning as a sort of "human computer", with intelligent sensors and intelligent nodes (people) and lightning fast communications between them?

How can you point at that and say that Twitter and Facebook are wasting their time?

Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different

#26

Post by aloneinkyoto »

genera wrote: post #21
bad_user wrote: post #11

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads Best minds of any generation have always thought about ways to make money. That doesn't mean that the world doesn't benefit from side-effects. Information is at your fingertips because of companies like Google and Yahoo. Staying connected is easier then before because of companies like Facebook and Twitter. And speaking about infrastructu…

>Best minds of any generation have always thought about ways to make money. Yeah, but sometimes it comes from developing technology that sends people to the moon. Or technology that reduced a roomful of vacuum tube computer technology to a chip the size of your fingernail. Or finding ways to mass-produce cheap chip-based computers affordable my hundreds of millions of people... You know, stuff that actually kinda mat…

> You know, stuff that actually kinda matters, and can improve people's lives.

Are you arguing that social networks don't improve peoples lives?

Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different

#28

Post by nika »

I've been investing for a long time. I've lived thru two bubbles already- the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble. I lost money in the first and made a killing in the second.

I won't say whether this is a bubble or not, but the number one thing I look for is businessweek (or newsweek) saying that "things have changed!" A mainstream publication putting the bull market on its cover is the prime indicator that it is a bubble and that it will be a painful crash.

It is almost a cliche.

The real bubble right now is in the dollar. We've been able to inflate, an export that inflation, for nearly 100 years, and we got away with it because of military might and manufacturing might (and bretton woods). 2 of those 3 are gone and the last one is losing respect rapidly. It is gonna be a bloodbath when those dollars come home to roost. (and it will kick off a bubble in gold.)

Maybe the bursting of this "tech bubble" (if we're in one) will be the trigger that causes the end of the dollar bubble.

Unfortunately I'm not aware of business week putting the dollar on the cover and saying "This time its different". (But maybe one of their covers for gold will count.)

Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different

#29

Post by jerf »

bruce511 wrote: post #15
turoczy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit. The headline belies the actual content. Which wasn't so flippant or off-putting.

"This bubble is always different"... Right up to the moment when the people involved lose everything and start eying their office windows and wondering if they open... Bubbles exist because human nature is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. Not every tech company collapsed in 2000 - but the weak ones surely went to the wall. Those with solid business models, and profitability are still going strong. Not everyone…

You should generally read the article before commenting. You should really read the article before replying to a comment about how you ought to read the article!

Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different

#30

Post by leon_ »

swombat wrote: post #25

You gotta be kidding me. Social media will leave nothing behind? How about a communications infrastructure spanning the whole world and connecting people to both friends and other people of interest in real-time, no matter where they are (in the bus, in the street, at home, at their computer), enabling the most rapid spread of information ever seen, and potentially enabling the world to start functioning as a sort of…

> How about a communications infrastructure spanning ...

tcp/ip? The infrastructure has been here for a long time. The reason why people start to "connect" with everybody now is because computers and mobile IP devices are becoming really cheap. People would be still communicating in realtime without twitter, facebook, co. SMTP, IRC and IM protocols were here before Mr. Zuckerberg knew how to spell PHP.

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