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Silicon Valley - The Geeks Are Back In Charge?
securitas writes "The New York Times' Steve Lohr reports on a fundamental shift taking place in Silicon Valley in the post-dotcom era: the geeks are back in charge. New start-ups and companies that survived the bubble 'are based on innovation and are run by people with deep technical skills.' These companies have real technology and a solid technical base that have historically been the bedrock of Silicon Valley - something that was temporarily forgotten during the dotcom bubble. Profiled companies include Tellme Networks (speech recognition), InterTrust (DRM - digital rights management), VMware (virtual machines) and Scalix (Linux e-mail servers)."
Inside Frank Quattrone's Money Machine
Let's not forget our friends over at IronPort Systems (www.ironport.com). Great product, great team...
..
Amazing, first real dot-com I've dealt with that has a real solid shot of being the Big Dog in what they do
"These companies have real technology and a solid technical base
InterTrust (DRM - digital rights management), "
Is it just me, or why do I feel bad when I read "real technology" and DRM in the same text?
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
1) Everyone fired or laid off post-dot-com was a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. In fact, middle-management is now finding their IT department unable to do much of anything without a huge budget increase or new equipment. Middle-management, as expected, is still sitting there, having meetings and trying to figure out what to do.
2) Anyone who can't get a job as a programmer now is a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. There are Masters Degree holders in both engineering and scientific fields of IT study who cant rent interviews, much less jobs.
3) Technical skills are a commodity.
False. Perhaps 10% of the working population has the training, education and experience to build a complete computer program. Middle-management, unable to understand this fact, much less the technologies they are in charge of, continues to presume that ordering a database is no different than ordering new file cabinets.
When these and other myths are no longer givens in the discussion of improving the IT department, then, and only then, will things improve.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
VMWare is considered a new startup? They have been around since 1998, andn actually have a very solid product at a reasonable price to offer... nope, can't be a dotcom2 startup!
Now you know why they were included.
Does this mean Carly will move back in with her mother at the trailer park?
Will the good stuff get re-branded back to Hewlett-Packard and the bad product lines get sold to Dell?
A geek can dream, can't he?
A Good Intro to NetBS
Let's advertise "I (love) X10" T-Shirts using pop-unders in google..!
Anyone?
How does tellme.com fit in here as a company run by geeks? They got over 200 million in capital for a quintessentially dot-com biz model: a consumer-oriented the-advertising-will-pay-for-everything phone service. They've only made it through the dot-com crash because they're sitting on a ton of cash and they've got AT&T backing them. Besides, they're less technology producers than technology integrators: the speech recognition engine they use is from Nuance.
Anyway, nice premise for an article. It's good in concept, but the writer could've done a better job finding companies that really represent the ideal of companies run by geeks and driven by innovation.
It's interesting to see a shift this way.
It seems that the tech industry is highly cyclical, and, once the current batch of geeks have innovated sufficiently to create marketable products, slowly business people will come to replace them
Once these products have run their course, and a recession kicks in, the shift happens the other way.
It's a fairly symbiotic relationship, I think, playing to each group's strengths. It's certainly worked for the past 40 years. Long may it continue
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
about Tell Me...
These companies have real technology and a solid technical base that have historically been the bedrock of Silicon Valley - something that was temporarily forgotten during the dotcom bubble. Profiled companies include Tellme Networks (speech recognition),
Tell Me has a solid technical base? Yeaaaah, forgive me if that doesn't boost a lot of confidence.
"Let's advertise "I (love) X10" T-Shirts using pop-unders in google..!"
Is that an X-10 popup ad in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?
Have you looked at their business model? and their millions in investments?
...
More like : this free Slashdot informercial brough to you by the TellMe board of directors
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I don't know why the New York Times chose them as an example of a "geek company" really the only true example of that was VMWare, which never was a dot-com bubble company in the first place.
On behalf of the rest of us in Silicon Valley, I, for one, welcome the return of our hornrimmed pocket-protected overlords.
Now excuse me if I disagree here, but these appear to be a combination of technical people with decent business people working towards a real solution or product. Technologists don't have to be "geeks", most are not. I'd say that the
Steve Jobs & Bill Gates are not geeks, and its THOSE sort of people, and people like Metcalf @ 3COM, and the founders of the other successful IT businesses that Silicon Valley is founded on. Its people who combine strong technical skills, with an even stronger view on how to make markets.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
It's vapourware, there isn't a price or a release date anywhere on their site.
--- Nukes don't kill people psychopathic megalomaniacs do.
What I hope is that techies are taking a lesson from Alan Cox, who is taking time off coding to do an MBA. Middle management have become too technically disconnected to be responsible for anything.
Perhaps things would be better if the mismanagement read "Learn $TECHNOLGY in 21 days". At least they might understand what is going on.
"How you resolve this issue is open to question. Despite general pessimism, the fact is businesses that need programmers will always find it easier to locally hire than set up labour pools in other countries"
The fact that they're outsourcing your job, shoots down the myth.
"but it's time for some realism and some recognition that a safe, well paid, job is usually better than a temporary obscenely-paid one."
3-People were laid off because the boss wanted to make the shareholders happy, and make his bank account fatter. The dot.com bubble didn't touch a LOT of people.
Blame the victum only goes so far.
I agree exactly with what you said.
Why is it that reporters eat every dish of crap served up by VC's, and constantly refuse to investigate the real news? Too tight deadlines I suppose.
This isn't limited to the NY Times. The San Jose Mercury News does almost nothing but repeat what VC's say to them. Dan Gilmore is a notable exception; and the only one to come to mind.
(Firstly, it's Digital Restrictions Management and nothing else - don't propogate the doublespeak.)
Can somebody who runs a company founded on the basis of closing off computers from their users, and making it impossible to hack them really be called a geek? This is a company that lauds and depends on the DMCA - which is the antithesis of everything that being a geek or a hacker means.
And besides, Intertrust makes software based DRM, which shows that they can't have any actual technical skills or they would know their product can be defenition not work. Except for the "let's get rid of the open PC platform all together" crowd (aka TCPA and Palladium), anybody selling DRM is selling snake oil. Apparently the NY Times got fooled.
Geeks back in charge? Read the whole article. We've been reading "Silicon Valley is back" articles for two and half years now. Initial investors in the companies mentioned will probably never get their money back. Bottom line is that a few dotcom firms are still living off of their IPOs at 10 percent of their staffing levels. The founders are collecting their paychecks and stuffing their 401Ks and outsourcing to India. "Geeks back in charge"? Nope. Business as usual is more like it. The last "geeks in charge" were Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak. One bailed out and the other morphed back into the privledged little rich boy brat he always was.
who also 'may' happen to own a few old t-shirts. that's all.
.com?'.
from the 'article" (after pateNTdead eyecon0meter filtering):
"we disappeared a 1/4 billyun so far, but in reality, we're just getting started".
similar quotes/entries can be found in the recently unpublished, 'hey buddIE, can you spare a
I know many people who are still employed simply because they do not have strong skills.
Management went through and axed folks who cost money. Skilled workers cost money.
They kept the low men on the totem pole. People that they could keep dumping crap work onto. People who will never find better jobs anywhere.
People who will continue to work applying hack after hack, and bandaid after bandaid rather than fixing any one problem because they do not know how to debug problems. People who accept gladly an artificially low salary.
They don't keep the skilled technicians that could maintain everything because they cost more money. instead they "hire the handicapped" and keep the cheap flunkies who do what they are told and will not complain when the finger of blame is pointed at them for the technology failing that they do not know how to support in the first place!
comment directly in my journal
Put the business back in the hands of engineers. I don't see an obvious problem with that...
Sure hope he sold his VA Linux shares on the day you quoted. It's down 98% since then.
I think the geeks have always been in charge (though I think "nerd" is a more appropriate characterization). It's just that for awhile, during the dot-com-boom, a bunch of MBAs showed up and snowjobbed management with their magical doublespeak skills and ran the companies foolish enough to drink their kool-aid into the ground.
Meanwhile, the many solid companies with a solid foundation of technical talent who maintained control over their ventures just plugged on. With all the FOD out of the way, they look like they're new when they're not.
Not only that, if you are skilled, employers for unskilled jobs are reluctant to hire you for fear you'll leave them as soon as you find a better job (which is true). Unless of course they know you can't find a better one because the economy sucks so bad (which is also true).
Skilled tech workers are in a double bind. Their jobs are being replaced by H1-B's, or outsourced overseas. The problem is companies go too far in reducing labor costs. Everyone wants the best bang for the buck. I do to, but you still have to spend money. It should be about getting the most value for your dollar and not spending the least you can possibly get away with.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
That's "you're" (a contraction of "you are".)
I'm not usually a pedant - but if you're going to call someone else stupid, better make sure you get it right.
Dickhead.
Last week, I turned down business for the first time this year for lack of available time. I dont think there is going to be a lot of hiring, but for Consultants like me, things seem to be getting good again really quickly.
If things continue like they have been, I may have to hire an extra couple of consultants myself.
consultant? that's not a real job, is it?
be careful out there. one of the criteria we use in screening poteNTshill 'employers', is how many fraud/larcenyindictments are pending in the upper management rank&files deleted.
bad programmers got greedy. good programmers are worth their weight in gold.
The same could be said of good teachers. Or good dentists. Or lots of other jobs that require equally as much talent, innate skill and hard work to earn the label of "good". Seriously, just because our field of interest happens to be technology doesn't mean there aren't other careers out there where dedicated, brilliant people don't stand apart from their peers and make a difference. And good _______ usually make more money than bad __________. But salaries for other fields still don't compare to what techies are paid. Programmers are still unrealistic about their expectations; management not so much... which is why you see the disasterously short-sighted trend to outsource overseas. They might be making the wrong decision, but they are reacting to a very real problem: IT salaries are still overinflated. (I say "over" inflated only because I think we are in the process of a correction in that valuation. If you want to get pedantic, I think that the market always pays PRECISELY what it values for careers. By definition. But because we are in the middle of a correction, those salaries will be sharply different in a few years.)
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
...companies like Intertrode, or ini-tech??
...hmm what is the world coming to?
bfg technologies striks me as another company like this. If you go to their web site and look around you will see that theya re a group of techie gammers who made a video card company. If you look at the "Why we are different" section of their web site you will see that the
1. offer 24 hr tech support.
2. a lifetime guarantee on all their cards.
3. that the owners of the company are huge gamers who make the cards so that can use them when the play games.
Note: this has been posted by r.future (a person who spends way to much time on the internet!)
Your Yankees lost last night, loser.
It was great seeing those losers crying.
GO MARLINS!
Two kickass reports about the whole 90's boom - one specifically going into some good detail on Quattrone - are viewable via Frontline.
Dot Con
Wall Street Fix
and even Bigger than Enron
Dot Con is much more specific as far as the whole Quattrone thing goes. It's amazing cuz I went thru that with a company that I help found (like many others I'm sure) and it's just phenominal the greed that ensued and how investment bankers and investors just took most of the public for a ride.
I'm actually glad that I never invested during this time, however, I had many friends and family that did and just got sacked. If the majority of the public really knew what went on during this period of time, I doubt they'd look to invest again. Of course, nothing like this in tech will probably happen again any time soon, if ever.
DRM is not about trust. The company should be called 'InterNoTrust'.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
Too bad for them most of this stuff was cliched by time they rolled it out as amusing press. Also too bad the IPO craze was over before they could flog it. They now stand as a totally irrelevant testiment to 90s greed.
Stop being such a racist demagouge trying to blame all your problems on "foreigners."
WTF! You must be a liberal, because that's usually the first thing they love to do is play the race card. You don't know anything about me. I am not a racist demogogue. If anyone is prejudiced, it's you. Who said I was the blaming the foreigners? I'm blaming the companies for getting laws created that hurt both immigrants (turns H1-B's into hi-tech coolies), and citizens (sets up an unfair system to exclude them.)
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Tellme only ever wanted to go public. It was so obvious in the absurd number of articles they were "planting" in tech rags, and the amazing amount of talk thry generated with a go-nowhere service. I remember going into their offices one night at the height of the media-darling phase. Sure, everyone was there at night, riding around on scooters and plyaing video games and building "forts" in their cubes. One guy riding around on his razor scooter starting giving me the third degree why I was in the office without an HR-approved escort (like my buddy who worked there did not suffice). Thats right dude, I'm here to steal your "secrets". When I let him know I was an early employee from an already-went-IPO (and still alive) company, he went from attack-dog to hero-worship mode.
Wow, congrats on that.
if they are calling it a dot.com bubble. A real geek would call it a "Tri-lithium-charged-electron-movement-inhibitor"
This article IMHO was very out of touch and even depressing. The future of information technology rests on the death of intellectual property (specifically copyrights), not it's rebirth. The blazing take-on of linux, one would think, would at least give them a hint of what drives the information economey. I just can't comprehend how someone would want to bet their career and their life-future on an "intellectual property" strategy. At this point in the game, it is almost pitifull. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps they're trying to sucker in investors who just still don't know better? so they can get out while before the ship sinks?
Guess that means any business sense has gone out the window (again).
VMWare is designed to run windows. If you are using Microsoft's products, you are already running Windows. Microsoft cannot touch VMWare's market.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's so easy, I wonder if you mean it.
Technology is a tool that does something useful.
DRM is nothing but a trade seceret that keeps people seperated from their information to one degree or another. It seeks, in its basest form, to impose the physical restrictions of older media on electronic media. They are using standard techniques and technologies that were worked out for legitimate purposes. No new ground is being covered and even the application is old. DRM companies no more deserve seed capital than a startup ball and chain company that thinks it has a new application for balls, chains and digital data.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
>>These companies have real technology and a solid technical base that have historically been the bedrock of Silicon Valley
Now all we all need is a business plan... Let's give away our product (we'll make it up in volume). We'll maximize our user-base communities and merge into an e-business to sell into vertical markets while maximizing our investment with our margin accounts.
All we need is an overpriced CEO, his favorite exec buddies, some groovy office space and expensive furniture.
Happy days are here again!
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
The sad fact is that for any product you should spend 80% of the money in marketing and %20 in development/testing. I've worked off and on for over a decade for a voice mail company that has a good product, but can't market it worth a damn. If you can't sell it, then it's worthless.
BTW, I created the phrase "The Magic Is In The Marketing!" over a decade ago and it's still the absolute truth.
DRM is nothing but a crappy derivative of other technology
Intel is leaving California. Good bye, good riddance don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this one... email for Linux? That's your killer application?
Holy crap, these people are geniuses!
No wonder most of these startups went under... jesus...
Steve Jobs & Bill Gates are not geeks
You are right about Jobs, but wrong about Gates.
Gates was a consummate geek.
Back in the day, Gates was a "code bummer", the kind of programmer who squeezes as much out of assembly code as possible with hand-optimization and clever tricks. Apparently he used to spend hours studying the op-codes. He used to contribute a technical article or two to Dr. Dobbs Journal with programming tips and tricks. He did programming work on the Digital PDP's back at Harvard, and along with Paul Allen, managed to squeeze a BASIC interpreter into the limited 4K of memory in the Altair. The code was later stolen, which would lead to Gates' infamous letter against software piracy. He also participated in harsh code reviews of his employees' work, up through the beginning of Windows.
Another time, I believe in the 1980's, he challenged technical magazines to supply the best programmers they could find in a programming competition, in which no one knew what the assignment would be until the competition started. Gates, representing Microsoft, won the contest by programming a solution in the fastest time-- albeit with a lot of cursing under his breath and a bit of sweating.
When Gates was dating Ann Winblad (a programmer entrepreneur in her own right, now a venture capitalist), the two would go on "Physics Dates", in which they would spend a couple of days with each other and physics textbooks, notably Richard Feynmann's lectures. If that isn't geeky, I don't know what is.
Say what you will about Bill Gates, he's not a "poser", or a "fake". He looks like a nerd, and acts like one too. Because he is. There's no way he could otherwise command the respect of the likes of Steve Ballmer, also a math wizard who placed reasonably well in the Putnam math competition whilst an undergraduate at Harvard. Or impress Don Estridge and his team of engineers back at Boca Raton enough to make IBM want to do business with Microsoft when they were planning their Project Chess --which became the IBM PC. Or impress the Mad Hungarian, Dr. Charles Simonyi (creator of the world's first WYSIWIG word processor) enough to jump ship from Xerox PARC to join Gates three years before the original Apple Macintosh was released.
Lots of pretend-techies in the tech world. Gates isn't one of them.
Tellme is a "call center automation" business, not "speech recognition". Tellme utilizes speech recognition as part of its technological and business infrastructure, but to call it a speech reco company is about as accurate as calling Ford Motor Company a "tire reseller".
It also shows that against the belief of all the "elite" techies, the companies kept on going.
It amazing how many people overestimate their value to others.
The name of the game is providing value, not about proving how l33t U R.
Figure out what people want and give it to them.
Laugh at my ignorance while I learn Rails - a Real ne
I don't think that programmer salaries now are overvalued much at all, nor do I see them correcting much further downward.
The fact is, programmers work does scale far more than most professions. I write software at a company that is used by the sales force (and external customers), in essence enabling the company to make millions of dollars they would not be able to make otherwise.
But even more than the positive effect a programmer can have, another easy way to see how a developer can justify a high salary is the cost of failure. A bad teacher might slow down learning for a thousand people for about a year each, but a system going down might lose thousands of dollars an hour (or much more!). If you are having people work on system that can make or lose thousands/millions of dollars an hour, you want to be pretty sure the code will lean to working more often than not, and thus high salaries are, I think, warranted - to paraphrase, with great power comes great responsibility, and great salary!
Anyone thinking the salaries will continue to drop is in for a rude awakening in about five years. However, I am not sure there will be as many total jobs as there used to be for a long time, even though I see the salaries stabilizing or even spiking.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Anyone thinking the salaries will continue to drop is in for a rude awakening in about five years. However, I am not sure there will be as many total jobs as there used to be for a long time, even though I see the salaries stabilizing or even spiking."
Engineer in US: $90,000
Engineer in India: $23,000
I'd say there's plenty of room for things to fall.
With all the jobs going to India, what else are they gonna do?
Believe it or not.... people still manage to make a living out of intellectual property, even when it is pirated like crazy. ...maybe they don't get as rich as they would like, but they still get their pocketmoney.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
A man is flying a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts, "Excuse me. Can you help me?
"I promised a friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I do not know where I am."
The man below says, "Yes, you are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees north latitude and between 58 and 60 degrees west longitude."
"You must be an engineer," calls down the balloonist.
"Yes, I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."
The man below says, "you must be a manager."
"Yes, I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know ?"
"Well," comes the answer, "you did not know where you are, nor where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem.
"The fact is, you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, BUT NOW IT IS SOMEHOW MY FAULT."
"Blah"
From what I've seen, "Skilled tech workers" is code for "glorified jsp/vb database frontend builder". No wonder their jobs are going away so quickly. Truthfully, that's one of the main reasons why I stayed in school for my MS, just to differentiate myself from the knuckle dragging, PDC-attending, corporate drone. Hopefully, when I'm done I'll be able to go into a job that requires a little more specialization (like managing the local McDonalds).
and that whole $30-million file manager fiasco. How embarassing.
There are few products these days that don't include software and many of these products are sold in the millions.
Take MP3 players. Without software it wouldn't be possible. It includes hardware. And software.
Its a complete computer.
So why does the whole thing sell for less than Windows?
The price paid for the software in an MP3 player and billions of other products is less than the price paid for the CD that Windows is shipped on.
Software has no more value than any of the other engineering that makes a product possible. That means that a programmer/software engineer shouldn't get paid more than the manufacturing engineer who figures out how to get 5000 widgets an hour spit out of the machine.
What has happened in the US is that people who turn ideas into software get paid a lot of money while the people who turn ideas into concrete products get paid peanuts.
The result is that almost no one goes into manufacturing in the US and many companies find that the lowest costs and highest tech is available outside the US in Asia and Europe and Russia.
But there is nothing special about turning ideas into software. There are lots of European and Russian programmers. What happens when 99% of the programming for products is done outside the US.
We won't get paid for turning ideas into software and we won't get paid for turning ideas into hardware.
A plumber is more valuable than a programmer. The programmer can be replaced with someone from Europe or Asia that has a masters or PHD while no one from India or China is going to be able to replace the burst pipes when you can't pay the heat bill because you can't compete with illegals working for Wal-Mart and Tyson.
Still, the answer isn't to build a wall between the US and the rest of the world.
Instead, let's build into fossil fuel and everything made with fossil fuels, the value of the rapidly depleted reserves.
The point of technology is to make better use of resources to provide more goods. What the US is leading at is using technology to deplete resources at a high rate in a rush to collapse. Only America would value, and pay lots of money, for technology that uses 2-10 times as much fuel to go from point A to B, so that in 20 years, no one will be able to get from point A to B by any means other than walking.
There are a small number of companies that are seriously investing in energy technologies and they will make a killing if the current trend of poor people in foreign countries expands. The are increasingly refusing to pump their oil and ship it to the US for only $20 or even $30 a barrel.
There are some who won't be happy with even $100 a barrel. A rocket hitting the right spot in Saudi Arabia would cause that state to fall into civil war. The unfolding civil war in Iraq might spill into Saudi Arabia and $100 a barrel oil wouldn't be far behind.
No amount of software will eliminate the need for huge numbers of wind mills or solar panels or massive new quantities of fiber glass insulation in buildings....