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Dan Gillmor Shares His 'Insider's View' of Silicon Valley
How much longer will programming stay in the US?
by georgeha
It's getting easier and cheaper to outsource programming jobs to India, Russia and Singapore (among other nations). How much longer can programmers count on a healthy, US based industry?
Dan:
Hmmm, I have to raise eyebrows at the word "healthy" when you look at today's marketplace. These are horrible conditions for average programmers, at least the ones looking for work. Stars are still in demand, as always.
Timely question, though, as this recent story in Mercury News makes clear. It's definitely cheaper to send work offshore, and it's also getting easier. Whether it's sufficiently easy -- or ultimately all that cheap when companies account for the hassles -- is unclear for the moment, though the long-range trend is not good for the U.S.
The cultural differences, not to mention time zones, are always going to be something of a barrier. I've spoken with folks who have tried to manage international engineering projects, and they tell me it can be hugely difficult.
But the communication/collaboration tools are getting much better. English is becoming a default language of business and technology. And as people outside the U.S. get better technical educations -- even as America keeps killing its own educational system -- we're going to see more and more competition from abroad.
I'm also disturbed by what I'd call a "hire 'em young, burn 'em out, discard 'em" tendency among too many tech companies in the U.S. It sends a terrible message to young people, because it tells them that tech careers are foolish. But this is a chronic American problem -- a short-term mentality.
Future directions of technology
by knightwolf
Currently, most of the industry relies on a silicon based technology, using optics to burn silicon wafers. What technology areas do you see the industry looking into, as well as what are areas the industry isn't looking into that it should? Add to this, what technologies are out there that in your opinion aren't looked at heavily enough? As a last part of this, where do you see most of the innovation. Is it in large corporations, such as IBM, or smaller corporations or startup companies?
Dan:
Last question first: Innovation is happening most of all in universities and small companies. Innovation in larger enterprises does occur, but it often gets squashed or modified in order to preserve profitable business models. This is a gross generalization, of course, and many of you will no doubt point out the exceptions that prove (or disprove) the rule.
I'm not as knowledgable about process techniques as I'd like to be, so the rest of this answer is going to be a bit speculative. But I do know this: Every time I look at what's happening with semiconductors I'm amazed at how "out there" the industry stays.
Silicon-based chips have a long future ahead of them. Moore's Law won't hit the wall for another decade or so, as I understand it. Every time someone outside the industry predicts that progress will slow or stop, these guys laugh and speed it up.
I always try to keep the other part of Moore's Law meaning in mind, too. Chip improvements aren't all about how mega-gigahertz processors will look and perform. They're also about how small things can get; I'm at least as interested in miniaturization's benefits as what we can do on the high end. I heard not long ago about someone who'd found a new use for the Z80, for example, and people will be finding great embedded applications for the 386 in years to come. What does it mean when an Itanium-level chip is just a tiny blip inside a communications device? Beats me, but it's gotta be cool.
Will some new kinds of process and materials replace silicon at the high end and revolutionize the field? Sure. I'm intrigued by quantum computing, and am studying hard to understand it.
Intel's plan to add radios to everything strikes me as one of the most important design decisions in a long time, and I think the move deserves even more attention than it's received. I love the idea that we're not just adding intelligence and memory to everything, but also connecting it all. I'm also getting excited at the potential of OLEDs, which could totally transform displays. Nano and MEMS, too, of course.
One of my worries is that the industry is not focusing sufficiently on complexity, however. I don't think we can afford a muddle-through strategy when everything is tied together and interacting in what are likely to be unpredictable ways.
I also worry a lot about trends in the law, particularly in the area of "intellectual property" -- an expression I'd like to ban from the language.
The patent system is out of control. Yes, the USPTO has recognized some of the problems, but it's still issuing far too many overbroad, non-novel and just plain absurd patents. Congress keeps swiping money from application fees and using it for other programs, thereby making it harder for the PTO to have a competent staff. Courts are getting clogged with patent lawsuits, and those are just the cases that make it into the public eye. When companies are hiring lawyers instead of engineers, innovation takes a hit.
The copyright arena is another worrisome area for innovation (and free speech and research, as /. folks know well). Hollywood is asserting the right to decide what IT innovation will be allowed to enter the marketplace. Jack Valenti told me outright recently that Hollywood was going to do something about peer to peer (translation: control it). It's disappointing to see so many technology companies jumping into bed with the entertainment cartel instead of fighting for customers' rights.
Governments are reining in the Net, more successfully than anyone should want to see. Sure, the Slashdot community will always find a way around the barriers, but if China can block 98 percent of average Internet visitors from seeing what they want, freedom loses. Here in the U.S., meanwhile, we're moving toward having two or at most three ways to access the Net in any given community. That's terrifying from an innovation and free speech perspective.
Media Understanding of Technology
by Dr. Bent
While reading articles about new technology from various mainstream media sources, I get the impression that they have absolutly no idea what they're talking about. It's clear to me that the average mainstream journalist has, at best, a minimal understanding of the techology that he or she is reporting on.
What impact does this have on the public's perception and awareness of new technoloy, and will this lack of understanding dissapear as older journalists are replaced by a younger, more tech-savvy breed?
Dan:
I sometimes get that impression, too. But [defensively] I don't think it's as bad as you believe.[/defensively]
Mainstream journalists are generalists, for the most part. At most big newspapers, reporters frequently change beats. This is done for freshness of approach, and to avoid common problems (such as getting too close to sources) that can affect fairness. The downside, of course, is a lack of depth at times. Staying fresh on technology is easier than, say, politics because so much is new all the time.
It's also important to keep in mind the mission of mainstream news media. We tend to be introducing ideas and news to audiences that may or may not know a lot about the specific subject. I don't excuse outright technical errors (one reason I try to run things by people who know more than I do), but I hold general-news media to a different standard than trade publications that are aimed at people who already know a lot. In my own case, even though I'm working for a Silicon Valley audience in the print edition, I assume that readers are smart but don't necessarily know a great deal about the topic at hand. The online audience tends to be more focused on tech issues.
One of the great changes in my business has been the result of technology. I assume that my readers know more than I do. I also think that's a great opportunity, not a threat to my journalism. When we're in this together, we get better results.
It'll be interesting to see how tomorrow's audience and journalists handle this evolution. My sense is that the combination of traditional journalism, tech-savvy reporters, weblogs, etc., will lead to a wider understanding of the issues.
the cycle of things
by Hanno
We all know the economy is going in cycles, but how cyclic is IT, in your experience? When was the last big downturn, what happened back then and what changed because of it?
Right now, most of "us" IT-workers are facing the results of "new economy" bubble and the consecutive downturn of IT.
Here in Germany, I remember that in 1991 when I finished high school, people told me not to go study computer science because back then, the career outlook was bland and many IT academics were unemployed or received low figures. Then came the internet, salaries and everything else exploded, which was nice while it lastet, yet incredibly surreal.
Right now clients are sitting on every single penny. I know highly-skilled IT workers who are nevertheless unemployed because companies stopped hiring and around us and even some of the former key players of the industry are going bust...
So, do you remember a similar economic situation in IT and how did you experience it?
Dan:
I arrived in Silicon Valley just as the 1990s boom was beginning to happen. But I came here from Detroit, where I lived for about 6 years. Both places know business cycles.
Modern Silicon Valley has always had its boom/bust cycles. They're a natural part of an economic sector as dynamic and fast-growing as tech tends to be. The last time was in the early '90s, and the valley was in a distinctly uneasy mode. It was hard to find jobs. Housing prices dropped a lot -- something that hasn't happened this time, to my astonishment -- and no one had a clue what would happen to bring things back. The Mercury News published stories wondering if the valley's best days were behind it.
Then the valley experienced something that's happened before -- it got kickstarted by something out of left field. The most obvious catalyst was Netscape, both its technology and the subsequent IPO. But the expectations that developed were just nutty. I say that as someone who firmly believes that the Internet is changing everything just not as fast as some hypesters wanted us all to believe. What struck me in the late '90s was the ridiculous idea that somehow technology had eradicated the business cycle. Maybe it will someday (and it might once digital communications and nanotechnology become ubiquitous), but no one with a sense of history should have swallowed the hype.
People who've been here for more than a couple of downturns say this one's as bad as they've seen, maybe the worst. We got so far ahead of rationality in the bubble that it's probably going to take more time than usual to restore robust growth. There's plenty of innovation going on, but we now have a huge overhand of public mistrust of markets -- and people are absolutely right to hold the financial community, some VCs and others who helped inflate the bubble in contempt.
I doubt we'll see another boom like the one that just crashed. But we'll come out of this mess. It'll happen when people trust the markets again, because there's lots of innovation going on. Problem: I fear that anyone who trusts the markets right now -- especially when Bush and his crowd are doing everything they can to torpedo essential reform -- is misguided.
Conflict of Interest
by joyoflinux
Have you ever had a conflict of interest; like, what you should write, rather than what would get you promoted or would be better for your career? How do you deal with this?
Dan:
No one has ever told me what I had to write, or what I could not write, within the context of my beat at any paper where I've worked. Naturally, I've had the normal disagreement with editors over how stories and columns have turned out.
I've been lucky in one major respect here: It's my gig to have strong opinions -- even when they're contrary to powerful interests in the valley, as they often are.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that conflicts don't occur. Of course they do. The best andidote, and prevention, is sunlight. Several journalism publications keep an eye out for ethical transgressions, but they're not widely read except inside the trade. I'm encouraged by the Web's growing influence in journalism criticism, and not just in traditional ways. I think it's great, for example, that people who are interviewed are posting transcripts of the interviews on their websites, to provide context for how they've been quoted.
Are there things I won't write about? Sure. I've been dinged for this, but I won't shoot poison darts at my own company, as a rule, though I did publicly criticize my employer when a division of the company endorsed an anti-Microsoft lobbying organization (while I agreed with the views expressed about Microsoft, I thought the endorsement by the company was not helpful for the journalism we do every day).
Is Apple truly against DRM?
by dpbsmith
I'd really LIKE to believe that Apple is taking a conscious and principled stand against digital restrictions management, as suggested in your article here: www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4193833.htm
Your article is, however, basically speculative.
Do you have any evidence that Apple really has an anti-DRM corporate strategy? Gateway has issued a limited but significant public statement of support for fair-use rights. Do you have any ideas why Apple has not done anything like this?
Dan:
Indeed it's speculative, but I tried to base this on the evidence instead of the rhetoric.
To answer directly: I don't think Apple has an anti-DRM strategy, though, even if I wish they'd go for it. I do think Apple has a generally pro-customer stance, which is a heck of a lot better than some other companies out there. Perhaps the company is looking for some balance in a situation where the sides are turning the issue into a binary question, i.e., total control or total anarchy. Example of balance: Apple doesn't enable iPod users to copy to other disks (not directly), but it hasn't done anything as far as I know to stop the third parties who make it easy to do so.
Gateway's campaign was terrific. But Gateway is part of the Wintel ecosystem, and there's no question that Microsoft is moving fast toward a Hollywood-friendly regime that's overtly pro-DRM. When Gateway starts selling nicely configured Linux boxes and promoting them in terms of customer choice and digital freedom, I'll be even more impressed.
Any changes in Valley startup culture?
by Infonaut
Thanks for taking the time to field our questions, Dan.
Silicon Valley venture capitalists in the late 1990s turned their money and attentions to bear on creating dozens of companies that never had any hope of turning a profit.
From personal experience I've seen just how powerful VCs are in shaping the development of the IT market through their iron-grip control of individual startups.
Have you noticed any fundamental power shifts or changes in the way startup IT companies are being funded and created in the Valley over the past couple of years?
Dan:
The major change is that hardly anyone is being funded at the moment. VCs run in herds, too.
I'm generally an admirer of venture capitalists, at least VCs who look far into the future and make risky bets. I do not have much respect for what VCs did in the late '90s, when they and their investment-bank pals pretty much shifted all risk into the public markets.
If there's a shift, I'm hopeful that it's back to the traditional risk-taking that helped spur so much innovation. The valley is returning to the idea of building sustainable businesses before cashing in. In the bubble, cashing in was almost the entire point. Good riddance to that.
The other major shift I've seen is the spreading of entrepreneurial risk-taking outside the valley. This is crucial to global progress. I've met smart VCs in other parts of the world, including places where long-term thinking is part of the culture, and they may have an advantage in the end.
Hidden corruption?
by PhotoGuy
I've seen an awful lot of money spent during the .COM boom, in awfully questionable ways. Ways that were just completely beyond comprehension. I've often thought that a better explanation than sheer stupidity, might be that there were kickbacks and other shady dealings going on (you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours).
With so much money having been tossed around, surely there was a lot of corrupt dealings; however, I haven't seen any press or other talk of such happenings.
Is it primarily because these companies weren't public and thus publicly accountable that any mini-Enron's were simply never discovered? In some ways, corruption would be a little more comforting of an explanation than sheer stupidity. I feel like I might be pretty naive in not realizing some of this is going on. What's your take on corrupt dealings, patronage, and such in the industry?
Dan:
You're not naive. I don't doubt at all that there was plenty of beyond-questionable behavior in private companies. But it's difficult for reporters or anyone else to get a handle on how much, and you're exactly right to suggest it's because public accountability brings more sunlight to the process.
Unfortunately, the news from the front pages every day tells me that accountability was in awfully short supply even in the public markets. Too bad the news is coming so late. But every bubble -- every boom -- brings out the financial sharks. It comes with the territory.
This one also brought out the ideologues in politics, funded by the sharks. The result was massive deregulation, which was in general a good idea, accompanied by a deliberate campaign to stop watching for bad behavior. That's why we didn't have cops on the beat, and why even now certain ideologues want to thwart reform. The states pursuing the investment banks are doing the best job at the moment, while the S.E.C. chairman, Harvey Pitt, seems hellbent on proving that he's the corporate lackey many people suspected.
Maybe I'm the one who's naive, but I believe markets need rules, because without enforceable rules no one can have any trust.
Promises, Promises
by gcondon
The IT press has been promising us a variety of malarkey for years - Microsoft innovation, Apple going out of business, Linux on the desktop, flying cars, ...
As I see it, to a large extent this is due to an over-reliance of IT journalists on industry contacts and a highly incestuous meme-pool.
Since industry contacts are driven by their own agendas to poison the meme-pool with hype and FUD, reporters typically serve only to reinforce entrenched concerns in the industry.
This is particularly troublesome given that the IT industry of uniquely reliant upon innovation which has traditionally emerged from smaller players & upstarts.
Therefore, does IT journalism really contribute positively to the industry and, if so, how?
Dan:
Journalism contributes positively to everything. Okay, stop laughing.
I think your premise is somewhat one-sided. It's true that journalists tend to echo the entrenched interests in every field. We also run in herds, for good and bad reasons, and we tend to quote the sources who call us back.
But I also have to say that I see plenty of great reporting, challenging the conventional wisdom and pointing us toward the real future. What fascinates me is that some of the best information, or leads, comes from nontraditional sources (and you're visiting one of them right now).
That's wonderful, because one of the jobs of the journalist is to separate hype from reality. I do this in several ways, including reading everything I can (including Slashdot, where I always spot angles I hadn't considered), talking with as many people as I can and, in general, questioning my own assumptions. I have the luxury of a job where I have the time for all this.
I'll even challenge one of your examples of malarkey. I've been dismissive of desktop Linux, too. For me, Unix on the desktop is called Mac OS X. But the open-source ecosystem doesn't care what I think. It's slowly but surely pulling together the pieces of a desktop environment that will be more than adequate for large numbers of users. Just as we tend to underestimate the long-range impact of Moore's Law, because analog creatures can't really grasp exponential change, I suspect I've underestimated the collective power of the community development process, which is an intellectual barn-raising raised by many orders of magnitude.
Activism?
by Anonymous Coward
IIRC, back in the day you were pretty seriously activist: I seem to remember you at Usenix handing out buttons and carrying signs.
Do you still consider yourself an activist? If not, what changed? Is there still a place for activism in the geek community? What is it?
Dan:
I think you may have confused me with someone else, perhaps John Gilmore, whom I admire but who is not a relative. The last time I can remember carrying a sign was an anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington in the early 1970s.
I guess I'm an activist in a sense, given that I devote much of the column to policy issues such as copyright, competition policy, privacy, etc. I strongly believe geeks need to be much more active. The people who want central control of everything are shutting down innovation and freedom -- and geeks have as much to lose as anyone, maybe more.
Deregulation in a competitive market is a good idea, as it allows the competition to work. The sham of pseudo-deregulation (such as what happened with the airlines, etc), is not proper deregulation in that there is still no equal playing field and equal access to all resources to be competed for.
Deregulation doesn't mean no laws concerning behaviour and legal requirements, it means that there are no regulatory barriers that favor one company over any other (and most forms of "deregulation" in recent history still have those barriers, and as a result, are not proper deregulation).
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
Probably was referring to the administration's refusal to back meaningful accounting reforms. Despite the fraudulent activites of Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and others we've still got an SEC chairman (Harvey Pitt) who is quite chummy with big business. And despite the creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the ideal candidate (John H. Biggs) faces opposition by the GOP. Mr. Pitt, who had informally offered Mr. Biggs the position, is now waffling in his support.
Right - the problem being that some things naturally are hard to create level playing fields for. Trains are a good example, the rail network in this country is a mess has been caused largely by privatization. The problem is ensuring competition - do people choose which train to catch based on price? Or how nice the trains are? Or what they think of the company?
No, they choose the train that will get them there when they want, the quickest. Always. The only time this doesn't apply is when you've got very long distance travel so the savings might be worth it, but on those lines there only tends to be one company, so you're stuffed anyway.
Water, another good one. Companies are supposed to compete for "franchises" - but they last 20 years! And who chooses which companies get the franchise? Not the customers.
Proper regulation doesn't mean favouring one company over another, it means enforcing standards and rules upon those companies. The problem is of course that sometimes you have double standards, big corps exploit weakenesses in international law to get the upper hand. News Corps BSkyB digital TV is a good example of this. In the UK there used to be a digital terrrestrial broadcaster (ONdigital/ITV Digital). They faced a lot of problems, some of which were caused by themselves, but one issue that didn't help was that they were strictly regulated and Sky, who broadcast out of Luxembourg, were not. So for instance ONdigital had to meet targets for subtitling, they had to do regional and sub-regional broadcasts (33 mpeg encoders for 1 channel), and they had to pay the government money for the priviledge of existing too. Sky had none of those worries, so in theory this was bad regulation, but if all the companies had been under its juristiction it would have improved TV for all of us, instead of giving Sky the upper hand.
but where are the SATA motherboards?
Uh... have you looked at any of the new motherboards? Most KT400 and Intel 845PE/GE motherboards have SATA support.
The support is, however, provided by a secondary chip on the motherboard and is not integrated into the South bridge or whatever yet. So you're constrained by the 133 MB/s of the PCI bus. Since no drive approaches even 66 MB/s sustained transfer yet, it's really not an issue though.
Intel made a huge sacrifice in IPC for clock-speed
Yes, and Intel is having problems with that now. The P4M (Mobile) has a lower clock speed and higher IPC. The Itanium even more so. And AMD's strategy of using processor rating has been remarkably successful - what's the actual clock speed of an AMD Athlon XP 2800? What about the forthcoming Barton core Athlon 3000? Only the die hard enthusiasts remember. Everyone else just assumes 2.8 GHz and 3.0 GHz respectively - which is wrong.
This is demonstrably false. I guess you just don't remember the days before airline de-regulation very well, but it was more expensive and there were far fewer options available to the traveller. The market de-regulation allowed the emergence of low-cost carriers like Southwest, JetBlue, RyanAir, etc. and these have been an outstanding benefit to the average air traveller.
While the major airlines are currently getting their much-deserved comeuppance for overspending and failing to adapt to the changing market, there are several airlines which stand out from the crowd for having managed to grasp key insights into the nature of the changes that de-regulation imposed upon the air travel market and have prospered as a result. The poster-child for this is Southwest airlines, a small airline that realized that the democratization of air travel (prior to de-regulation the majority of Americans had never flown in an aircraft, after de-reg the numbers have shifted significantly towards air travel as a common and preferred mode of transportation) would allow them to efficiently run short-haul flights with quick turn-around and fewer costly perks to the air traveller. By avoiding the hub-and-spoke arrangement of its competitors and running short flights on a common airframe SWA was able to get more flights out of fewer planes. It also cut down its maintenance costs and per-passenger operating costs.
And how exactly is the dearth of new aircraft types the fault of airline de-regulation? If anything, there were too many different aircraft types. One of the things which is killing the major airlines like American or United is the fact that they have too many different types of aircraft: each one requires its own set of maintenance procedures and facilites and a maintenance and pilot staff trained for that aircraft type. Airlines do not exist to keep aeronautical engineers employed. The decrease in the number of aircraft types being flown is a good thing for the air traveller!
Additionally, most air travellers do not really care about perks and meals if they can get from point A to point B cheaper. BTW, what are the frequently flyer programs that have sprouted up in the post-de-regulation world if not the most successful perk program ever?
If by "regulation" you mean content control, Sky are (and have always been) regulated by the Independent Television Commission. While it is true to say that the satellites are run from Luxembourg (by SES-Astra), Sky rents space on the transponders and is UK-based in order to be able to run its subscription service (with their main call centre being in Livingston, Scotland if I remember rightly).
ONdigital had to meet targets for subtitling, they had to do regional and sub-regional broadcasts
If you mean regional news channels, Sky does those as well. Not being a subscriber, I cannot comment on subtitling but its cost should be quite small compared to the programming cost (you can do with only one person and relatively straightforward equipment).
OnDigital's failure has been mostly ascribed to a single, naively-negotiated contract for footballing rights, for which they paid an amount they could not afford. I would also suggest that their consumer approach (where you could only *rent* a box with a full-channel subscription rather than buy one to sample the free channels) was flawed. The new regime with Freeview seems more promising with no subscription needed, and cheaper (£99) set-top boxes.
The problem here is that UK (and Europe) satellite broadcasting has been a 'natural' monopoly due to the very high entry costs, plus competing brings the extra costs of a "bidding war" for film rights (this was a major reason for British Satellite Broadcasting's "merger" with Sky in 1990 as well as the demise of u>direct, an independent film channel broadcasting on the Sky platform). For Europe, replace Sky with Canal (in its various incarnations).
Despite this monopoly, Sky is still making a loss (football rights plus the subsidy on supplying free Digiboxes to new subscribers) and I believe that Canal has only recently started to show a profit.
Wandering back on top, for de-regulation it is not what you do but how you do it that is the key issue. It can only be beneficial if the consumer has control, and that means having the opportunity to make a choice and the information to make a "good" choice. The de-regulation of the financial industry in the UK during the 1980s gave people a wider choice for pensions, savings policies and loans but, because of the complexity and lack of independent information, unscrupulous and dishonest salesmen were able to "sell" (ie in many cases lie about) inappropriate and unnecessary products resulting in a multi-billion pound misselling scandal. Enron paupers, you are not alone...
--to revisit outsourcing, and also massive immigration as regards "jobs". I know from a silicon valley perspective there still is "work", but on various other forums and irc channels, in the heartland it's hitting home hard, across the board, white collar and blue collar. I think that your estimate -I'll call it "cautious"- is a severe low-ball estimate. My opinion, this entire economy is tanking, and tanking hard. On one semi large forum I visit, they held an impromptu poll, result, 30% current un-or-underemployment, various fields, not just IT, various, software engineers to teachers to construction, you name it, it appears to be worse anecdotally than the "official" numbers promulgated by the government and wall street. I include in these figures people who have a "job", but have had to keep seeking work with the result every new job has resulted in severe pay cuts, often several in the past two years. This jibes with what else I have noted over net anecodtals for the past 2 or 3 years, most generally speaking.
..well....I think it's going to get most ugly...
I think a lot-most-companies are still not bingoing that every laid off / fired worker is also a laid off / fired consumer and customer, thus bad begatting bad leading to worse leading to
Two questions, 1 -are you aware of ANY high level money guys or CEO's who actually understand what's happening and basically agree with my assessment, and if so, who,, and 2- which fields do you think will persevere no matter how "crashed" we become in terms of more unemployment, inflation or actual depression, etc.
thanks in advance should you choose to respond.