Slashdot Mirror
The Hypocrisy In Silicon Valley's Big Talk On Innovation
glowend writes "James Temple writes in the San Francisco Chronicle: 'In the fall of 2011, Max Levchin took the stage at a TechCrunch conference to lament the sad state of U.S. innovation. "Technology innovation in this country is somewhere between dire straits and dead," said the PayPal co-founder, later adding: "The solution is actually very simple: You have to aim almost ridiculously high." But for all the funding announcements, product launches, media attention and wealth creation, most of Silicon Valley doesn't concern itself with aiming "almost ridiculously high." It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year.' I feel like this may be true as more money and MBA types invade the Silicon Valley. There's a lot of 'me-too' startups with some of the best and brightest figuring out ways to sell me stuff rather the working on flying cars."
And other bright minds are trying to find ways to get the first post.
That's all, really. This is bullshit.
i mean i can't believe there aren't hordes of VC's just waiting to invest in companies that don't have any sales or revenues.
advertising has always been about targeting your ads. we gone from the 18-49 demographic to targeting advertising to as a few as a few dozen people. what's the point of marketing something to people who will never have an interest in buying your product?
silicon valley has always been about incremental improvements, periodic revolutions in tech followed by dozens of me too investments
Look back at the innovative days of Silicon Valley and pick something, anything you can think of and think of what would happen if you were to try and perform the same thing again today. You could never do it, because overzealous IP has killed all American engineering innovation. Many products now spend a significant amount of their budget on patent attorneys and cross license costs. You simply cannot innovate in today's climate as things presently stand.
Some simple ideas that would help protect IP and turn the tide back for innovation:
A patent fee, every patent that is held by an organization (or it's parents organization) doubles in costs.
- Allows the small time inventory to register patents without undue cost while adding some measure of expense to patent warchest building.
A patent tax, every patent is taxed at a rate that makes large patent war-chests financially unfeasible.
- You can cripple IP trolls on this by increasing the tax for a patent that is not in active production.
Shortening the length of time that a patent is good for based on the type of patent.
- Decreasing a patent's shelf life to 5 years would probably do more to free up the IP logjams than any other thing.
Make RAND rates standardized for everyone and don't allow them to be offset. /reasonable/ rate.
- Everyone pays the same RAND rates and if your patent is essential than anyone can license it at a fixed and
End massive patent paydays like Apple's recent billion dollar court win.
- Reform the financial benefits for 'going nuclear' and seeking large court settlements for patent violations and make the penalties fixed.
There is no room for failure. Without failure, and the ability to take risks, you'll get a lot of me too ish. Silicon Valley thrived when it was cheap to fail, now that it nolonger is you need to look to other places. I'd expect something more radical outta Detroit (where the buildings are almost free) or Kansas City, with the Google Fiber, than the Valley.
Computers have been getting "slightly better than last year" for a few decades now.
Because of that, I'm now running a Quad i7 with a Geforce and a couple terabytes of SSD+HDD rather than a IBM PC with a monochrome adapter and two floppies.
I'm not complaining.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Silicon valley, and more about economic theory. Do free-markets drive the world in the right direction, or does the government? This, as in most things, seems to boil down to a compromise.
We need agile markets, able to open and close companies overnight, therefore allowing for innovation, failure and re-birth. BUT, we also need big, slow-moving government to keep those businesses from harvesting short-term profits and dumping losses on investors/governments.
The problems that we have today (a bit off topic here) are related to business being tied a bit too close to government. Why do we have the lowest congressional approval rating that I can remember? Because they all seem to be bought and sold by the same companies. In reality, though, they're not outright bought and sold, they're just trying to secure a sweet, sweet consulting deal after they retire from government. But I digress.
This article isn't about the hypocrisy in silicon valley in particular, and more about the hypocrisy in people lauding free-market capitalism.
When capitalism runs a muck
Blame the VCs -- real technology innovation is costly and slow
Blame the entrenched enterprises and government -- the first group want to stifle innovation and the second empowers them to do so via the patent system
Blame the entrepreneurs -- for not taking the risk of innovating in spite of the above
Blame ourselves -- for criticising those remaining few who try and fail
I've been saying this for years now. I realize that there's the inevitable law of diminishing returns when it comes to relative technology improvements we meager humans notice in daily life, but in my opinion (whatever that's worth), we're no where near seeing meager real-life returns and there's a lot of innovation most could use in their daily lives that can still be done.
Many companies have found a nice saturation/optimization point where consumers are happy repurchasing products with minimal investment on real innovation/improvement... maximizing ROI. That's sort of the goal of a for profit business, is it not? What I find astounding is that competition hasn't come in to sweep the carpet under these stagnant groups, but I'm guessing it's hard to gain entry into these markets to compete and you'll probably die trying, so the risk of competition is minimal to none. Plus there's brand loyalty and relatively unconcerned consumer market swaying stagnation with their buying power.
Maybe I'm very wrong, I really truly hope so. Everyone wants to make a buck, progress be damned. The entire state of affairs is pitiful if you ask me.
Sending a URL using a modem only with smartphones isn't innovative enough for you?
Man, people are so demanding.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
There's a lot of 'me-too' startups with some of the best and brightest figuring out ways to sell me stuff rather the working on flying cars.
The flying car was your grandfather's future, and it now sounds weird to use it as a symbol for the future.
The flying car is a symbol for a future that never was.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
what's the point of marketing something to people who will never have an interest in buying your product?
One might think this was self-evident, but you'll never get a marketer to believe that not marketing anything to someone is a good idea.
If you want to really innovate on a fundamental scale you probably wouldn't be writing software that runs on today's (or next year's) servers, desktops, web browsers, tablets, or phones. I mean, that's obvious. But then you'd probably be scruffing about for money, unless you were independently wealthy like Bill Gates, or were tied in with someone who was.
What do you expect, with the business environment that we are working. They would work on the flying cars if they thought they could sell any of them.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself.
Innovation != Invention. Innovation is, by definition, easy. Innovation is the blue collar work of the intellectual realm.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Newton, Xerox Star, Next, Intel's iAXP432, Xanadu Project, the Windows 2001 Tablet, Japan's HD analog TV R&D project, that company that tried to make an online MS-Office competitor with Java applets, and many other "bold" ideas that were ahead of their time failed.
The market and technology has to be "just almost ready" for stuff to take off. If you are too early, then your configuration and vision are probably all wrong. It takes trial and error with consumers and users to tune products right. The first shot at something bold is usually just too quirky or too expensive.
Palm Pilot did Newton better than Newton, and smart devices improved up the ladder through Blackberry until they were ready for mainstream with iPhone having the right mixture of features and ease of use. (Sorry fans, but Newton sucked from a practicality angle.)
And the few times big gambles get wings, competitors usually make a better run at the idea and the payoff is not big enough to justify the up-front risk. VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet is just such an example. After about 3 years of strong sales, Lotus came along and did it better, faster, and cheaper (gambling on IBM PC instead of CPM), and VisiCalc went belly-up. (Software patents didn't really exist back then, which will be another problem with very new ideas.)
In investing, you usually don't want to take a big risk unless there is a big potential payoff. But history shows for big-leap projects, the risks are big but usually not the payoffs. Incremental innovation looks like a better mix of risk and reward to rational investors who study history.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, it would be wonderful? No, it wouldn't, because you'd have idiots crashing the things everywhere. Half the problem is getting the things off the ground in an efficient, near-vertical-takeoff configuration without making them so short-range and having such high energy requirements that they aren't practical. The other half of the problem is making them *remotely* safe for the average person (rather than a fully-qualified pilot). Both of these are *huge* technical challenges, and I'd argue the second one is a lot more challenging, because it means making the vehicles practically autonomous. It's hard enough with cars on a 2D surface ground car. Going 3D in airspace is a lot harder. The software isn't ready. And I don't mean "toss a GPS in it and some route planning and we're done" kind of approach, but the kind of thing where even if someone went nuts and decided they wanted to ram one of them into their ex-wife's house, you couldn't actually do it -- i.e. not only "fool-proof", but "malicious-proof". It just ain't going to happen.
This isn't meant as an anti-innovation rant. Innovate away. And the article is right that figuring out new ways to trick us into parting with our money via marketing isn't real "innovation". On the other hand, there are plenty of more practical problems that deserve some innovation and could make the world a better place besides flying cars.
The money did not evaporate like water, so who got the $$$ that millions of american lost by "investing" in Silicon Valley companies?
I'm glad he's putting his money where is mouth is. But ironically, he made his billion on a low-hanging fruit like PayPal; and it was sold off after about 4 years.
Let the millionaires and billionaires take the risk; for a schmoe like me, "risk" means having unprotected sex and having a second child which we cannot afford.
http://www.redfin.com/CA/Newark/4931-Bosworth-Ct-94560/home/1763349
It seems to me that most of the 'startups' covered are based around trivially simple ideas (camera filters, decisions, etc) and a polished mobile application.
This seems to be the formula for media coverage (since the tech press largely lacks a technical background and can't comprehend or write about anything more complicated) and it this is apparently the formula to get bought by one of the tech companies.
But there is another issue here, one that is hardly ever mentioned and that's the coining of the term "innovation." This word, which was hardly used at all until two or three years ago, feels to me like a propaganda campaign and a successful one at that, dominating discussion in the computer industry. I think Microsoft did this intentionally, for they are the ones who seem to continually use the word. But what does it mean? And how is it different from what we might have said before? I think the word they are replacing is "invention." Bill Shockley invented the transistor, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce invented the integrated circuit, Ted Hof invented the microprocessor. Of course others claimed to have done those same three things, but the goal was always invention. Only now we innovate, which is deliberately vague but seems to stop somewhere short of invention. Innovators have wiggle room. They can steal ideas, for example, and pawn them off as their own. That's the intersection of innovation and sharp business.
I don't think you're getting it. Sales and marketing are, of course, important aspect. But the thing they are saying is instead of selling new things, they are selling old things (sometimes with incremental improvements) in new ways.
But this problem is much larger really. Everything from music to movies and TV shows are doing this sort of thing. How many super hero movies? The new territory seems to be fairy tales. Why aren't they writing really original stuff?
The problem is that everyone now thinks that all technology is IT-related. IT has become the ultimate Groupthink. Everyone just wants to do the same old dotcom crap. And dotcoms have now become to IT what plastic dogshit became to manufacturing. IT has sucked away bright minds from every other field. Nobody wants to do anything difficult and risky anymore, because they're more comfortable settling into the same old IT slog.
My obsolete smartphone fits in my pocket and has the computing power of Cray X-MP. We have the technology to read your entire genome in hours. We can index billions of web pages and retrieve them by keyword, ordered by relevance, in a millisecond. We can create realistic digital special effects, in real time, on personal computers. We have several private companies with satellite launch capabilities. Whoever thinks technological innovation isn't still happening is just not looking.
The only innovation a jewish money changer knows is how to help himself to other peoples money with a good enough story
people are getting out of finance, and getting their hands dirty again, turns out fucking over your communities for a bullshit story only works short term.
As TFA says, the MBA types have killed the innovation that laid the golden egg.
Most of that money never existed in the first place.
Here's a simple example. Ten friends start a company. They each put $100 in, and they each get one share. Total valuation is $1,000.
One of the partners finds a buyer willing to pay him $150 for his share. The company is now worth $1,500. But only $1,050 worth of _real_ money has ever changed hands.
Stock markets value companies at price last paid for a share x number of shares. But until all shares are bought at that price, most of that money doesn't exist.
"...who got the $$$ that millions of american lost by "investing" in Silicon Valley companies?"
The big banks who did the under-writing of the IPOs for these over-hyped companies and the early shareholders (sometimes the same banks doing the IPO) who sold out before the reality of the company's prospects became apparent.
Capitalism is supposed to be beneficial for mankind in that advancing technology is supposed to be profitable, which is the reason for the recent incentives to privatize the space industry. Of course the link between innovation and profits isn't direct, so oftentimes innovation will steer off course towards designing a more visible animated billboard for the underside of that flying car rather than increasing redundancy in its lift components.
The biggest difference is that the truly big inventions aren't just software. They use software but are associated with sharp hardware developments.
The truly big things require exploiting new physics and chemistry. 6 person startups of the Proper Profile of Startups (24 to 31 year old Stanford CS graduates) don't do this well. New physics requires large labs, many years of work, and listening to old men with European accents. Return on capital is much lower for the owners of physical atom-based companies compared to bit-based companies, but the return to societal prosperity is substantially higher. Hence rational capitalism dispenses with investing in such atom-based companies.
Also the golden era of Silicon Valley was paid for by investment for military hardware, and not venture capitalists.
Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal, is right. Silicon Valley should instead focus on providing services that treat their customers like dirt and everyone hates, like Paypal.
More Twoson than Cupertino
going from say $10 billion market cap to $226 billion does not mean someone invested that money into the company. it just means people bid up the price of the shares based on beliefs of the company's future earnings and ability to pay dividends. chances are only a small percentage of shares held actually changed hands.
same thing with the fall in valuation. people dump their shares at lower and lower prices and the market cap goes down. not like people lose real money
Yet what happened to the 1050 when the whole company 'went away'? Money does not just 'go away'. The imaginary bit is the 450.
And I just realized slashdot ids are up in the 2 million range?!...
Make it easy and cheap to file defensive patents. So you own the idea, and nobody can stop you from exploiting it, but you cannot stop anyone else from exploiting it as well.
Write up your description and claims as if you were going to apply for a patent, but do not file it with the Patent Office. Instead, publish it as a white paper and notify the major tech news sites in your field. Congratulations: you've just made a defensive publication. If you publish details of how to build your idea, then you've established your inventorship. After the date of publication, if anyone else applies for a patent on ideas that you've published, the application is invalid because it is not novel. And contrary to some people's claims, the recent transition in U.S. patent law to a "first to file" rule does not change novelty.
Who invented Mathematics, Trigonometry, Boolean Algebra, Computer Science, Calculus, Language, again?
Boolean algebra is named after George Boole. Alonzo Church and Alan Turing independently formalized computer science by introducing machines capable of verifying assertions in first-order logic and showing why it is necessarily imperfect. Calculus was also independently invented by two people: Newton and Leibniz.
Oh wait, they are LONG DEAD
We benefit because unlike trademarks, and unlike copyrights since 2003, patents expire.
Maybe that person said "this is crazy, I gotta get out", or maybe they rode the tide all the way up to $226 billion and said "I want to buy a house with my proceeds, gotta sell". or they noticed that rapid gains in the tech sector had left their asset allocation unbalanced so they said "Gotta rebalance--sell half the tech and buy some other sectors and a few bonds"
The value of the company evaporated, but the money was already gone. The people who kept their money aren't that different from the people who were left holding the stock when it fell...it's just what happens when you toy with a bubble.
Bottles.
When you punish people for taking risks or innovating (in the form of legal restrictions, IP suit craziness, taxes, legal potential for your industry to be suddenly nationalized, etc), you get less of it. People everywhere, including Silicon Valley, are engaging in low risk or no-risk operations because they are trying to reduce their overall risk. Business is risky enough without having the extra governmental and legal risks added on top.
You clowns are just figuring this out now? This is been going on for some time. It's mostly toys being sold to fools. Real innovation stalled, in it's place are a billion web monkeys laboring to produce applications that don't explode in your face since they are built on some of the most bass-ackwards technology every produced.
I'll agree with you on the dotcom bubble. AOL may be a bad example. AOL managed to rack up enough money to buy Time Warner before being spun back off as a stand alone company again years later so stock value doesn't tell the whole story. Smart move to take the hyped stock value to buy real assets. Sure even Time Warner said it was a bad idea but they're still around. It wasn't a crash and burn the likes of webvan or PETS.com or all the other huge chunks of money thrown away.
...with some HIGHLY specific case... which you've apparently forgotten to address in your post.
Instead, you chose to reply to "A pension, whether in the public or private sectors, is an agreement between employer and employees.", which is a perfectly valid but incomplete definition of a pension (it's a three party agreement) - with a rant about some case in the government sector, known only to you.
We have no idea what case you are talking about.
All we see here is you implying that ALL pensions are basically corruption and thievery.
As such, your post is not "the nadir of right-wing stupidity".
It's flamebait.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The passage of Sarbanes-Oxly cut stock options grants to rank and file engineers (who create great things) and are now limited to executives (who market great creations). As a result 24/7 startups are dieing, in my humble opinion. Why work 24/7 when VPs are the only ones being rewarded? Go home at 6pm, sleep in on weekends, and play with your dog for a change.
Wage stagnation, health care cuts, & dry bonus pools implemented by highly profitable companies during the recession in the Valley only underscore this reality. You get what you pay for.
Whoever was second to last to own the company gets to keep the money.
During the dot-com boom, the companies themselves were the product. Whatever they happened to do (or attempt to do) wasn't very important. The goal was to get to the IPO as fast as possible and unload the company onto the unsuspecting public. Financiers (at least the ones who didn't start believing their own BS) didn't really believe that you could make a fortune selling dog food over the internet. They believed that you could make a fortune selling a company that sells dog food over the internet.
"Why aren't they writing really original stuff?"
It's easier said than done. To understand why, see: The Tropeless Tale
When you're talking about the stock market, yeah, it does simply 'evaporate like water'. Market value is a collective hallucination, not a checking account.
, health care cuts, & dry bonus pools. Sounds like you work for Apple.
does bitcoin count as a novel invention? and look how slashdotters reacted with disgust.
In science, incremental "results" get rehashed more often than truly new findings for two big reasons.
1. You can't go too long without actually "producing" anything even for tenured professors. If you go 5 years without putting out a paper because you're only focused on a real finding, you tend to not get grants, people working in your lab, or lab space.
2. It's a lot harder to discover something totally new than it is to make incremental small discoveries. You know what you're looking for, you know how other people have found it etc.
Similar principles probably work for the movie industry as well. It's got to keep churning out movies on a regular schedule to stay open. It's probably far easier to make a movie that's similar to another movie since you know what worked and what didn't from that movie. And unless you're emulating a movie that bombed, the rehashed movie probably isn't going to bomb either.
With both, the big names probably get a lot more room to take big chances than those just starting out. It's probably a fine balance in both to build up to that point. You have to take risks, but unless you're really lucky, you're going to have some bad luck. Some big theories and papers aren't going to pan out, or some movies that tried something really fresh are going to totally suck.
For many, many reasons. Well known to anybody that cared to find out. In fact, people calling for work on flying cars are pretty stupid themselves.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Everything from music to movies and TV shows are doing this sort of thing. How many super hero movies? The new territory seems to be fairy tales
It's always been this way. Look in any decade since the 1930s, and the vast majority of movies are 'me-too' movies. For that matter, it's not a huge exaggeration to say that most pop music in the last 40 years is 'me-too' copying the Beatles. And the Beatles were just 'me-too' Tin Pan Alley players.
The problem is, something original is extremely rare. If you get a truly new good thing once in a decade, you're doing good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The money was given to previous stockowners who sold their shares. If AOL IPOs at $10, gets sold to person A for $20, sold to person B for $40, sold to person C for $75, and sold to person D for $100, then the stock crashes to $10, the $90 person D lost was distributed as:
$25 to person C
$35 to person B
$20 to person A
$10 to person AOL
Note that the company is not the beneficiary of its own high stock price (unless it held onto and decides to sell additional stock at a later date). The capital AOL received for its IPO was (number of IPO shares sold) * (stock price at IPO). $10 in the above example even though its stock peaked at $100. Also, don't make the mistake of thinking from the above example that the economy is zero-sum. It's not. But increases in the valuation of stock have to be linked to real increases in productivity for everyone to get "richer". If AOL had introduced real long-term productivity gains to the economy, their stock wouldn't have have crashed, and person D would still be holding onto $100 of real value instead of $10.
Furthermore, money is a representation of value/productivity. In fiat monetary systems like ours, it's created out of thin air to try to keep its value proportional to the size of the economy. If you do this right, the price of goods stays relatively constant (though you want a small amount of inflation to encourage people to use money to try to improve their productivity, instead of hiding it under a mattress waiting for its value to go up). If you do it wrong and make too much money, or a bunch of money is made and its value evaporates due to an economic bubble popping, the economy normalizes for this by increasing the price of goods (the money becomes worth less because there's more of it per unit of productivity than there used to be, though weak economic growth replacing some of the lost valuation can also help the normalization). This process of normalization is what causes a recession (slowdown in velocity of money).
This is the same reason why simply increasing the minimum wage to make it a living wage doesn't work. The value of the work done by minimum wage workers - the productivity their jobs add to the economy - has to be sufficient to live off of before it can be paid a living wage. If its not, then raising the minimum wage doesn't magically make it possible to make a living doing those jobs. It simply eliminates those jobs from the market since the employer would be paying the worker more than the value they get for the job being done.
I was employed by the once-mighty Xerox for a few years and was really saddened by what passed for "innovation" there and the quarterly patent quotas imposed upon Engineering.
There was this constant demand from management for engineers to produce a steady stream of candidates ideas for patenting, mostly to make up a quota to remain relevant in the "marketplace" of cross-licensing deals with other major companies (IBM, HP, Microsoft...).
It was absolutely pathetic, from an engineer's perspective, of what management thought was worthy of putting forward for patenting. Although, to be fair, this was just a wider symptom of the industry, not just Xerox.
Trivial things like microswitches to sense the level of paper in a tray in a copier, new button graphics on the GUI panel (signifying a "new" operation) and, particularly galling for software engineers, an array of statically-initialized C structures!
This all ended up with engineering being largely outsourced to HCL, of India. Luckily I escaped. I gather things aren't going to well there. Projects are very late and Wim has fallen on his sword.
Innovation in the West, and especially in the US, has become a race to produce quotas of trivial patents and other "intellectual property" so that your company can participate with power in the IP protection racket.
Oh wait, they are LONG DEAD
unlike trademarks, and unlike copyrights since 2003, patents expire.
You seem to neglect the fact that ideas are being patented today, not inventions. It has nothing to do with copyrights or trademarks
My point is that even if ideas are being patented, by the time the "inventors" are LONG DEAD, the patents will have expired.
So the problem, as I understand your explanation, is that the novelty requirement is a dead letter because the USPTO routinely grants patents that fail novelty and patent holders abuse the presumption of validity to dilate proceedings. How is it different from any other area of law where the party with the biggest litigation budget wins?
I tune out when I hear a companies business model is "ad-based". Reason: there is only so much revenue available from companies that make "real" products. Of that they will only part with a certain amount of it for marketing before the marginal return goes negative. Thus every stinking crapware company is fighting for the same dollar. Ultimately someone has to make something that will make a customer willing to part with their money to make the size of the tech industry to grow otherwise you might be making high tech but you are fighting for Walmart dollars.
Market value is a collective hallucination...
Wow, just like water. When those dihydroen oxide molecules get moving fast enough it just disappears. Water isn't real.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
How is it different from any other area of law where the party with the biggest litigation budget wins?
The party with the biggest budget doesn't always win. You are just being cynical. A big budget is only beneficial when you can win by dragging out the process. So allowing defensive patents (and maybe patent pools) is a win because it switches the burden of proof from the polyopolists to the monopolist. If the wannabe monopolist uses their big budget to drag out the process, they lose, because everyone can use the innovation in the meantime.
Well really, if we look at history. The big discoveries were made by incremental efforts. Sometimes the next step looks really big and important. But you don't get there without the rest of the staircase.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Wanna spawn innovation? Kill the present system that allows do-nothing patent trolls to tie up innovation in court before it ever sees the light of day. In the present system somebody comes up with a good idea, patents it, and then sits on their ass waiting for somebody with the cajones to take the product to market. Then they fly in saying, "pay up sucker." And more and more the warchests of patents belongs to the larger conglomerates who buy them up as if they are baseball trading cards.
That's the problem.
And as long as those companies have deeper pockets and richer lobbyists at their disposal it will never change. They all want it to change...but deep down in side they don't. Or it would have been fixed long ago.
Why aren't they writing really original stuff?
really original stuff is getting written, it's just not made into movies. the reason is that the backers of such movies have discovered something. simply having a story line that people are familiar with on any level is more important to a movie's success than an original, well written story.
Look in any decade since the 1930s, and the vast majority of movies are 'me-too' movies.
exactly. the difference is (for me) i'm old. i've had lots of time to see things come around again. when you are a kid, it all seems new, even if it's a rehash. then when you are old, you look back to being a kid and how much better it was because everything was new.
Lawrence Hargrave, 1893:
More risk in new stuff. Capitalism today=major risk aversion. Why there are remakes, sequels, prequels, films based on video games and tv show sketches from Hollywood, copycat comedies and reality shows on TV, and no investment in new plant or equipment or employees from industrial capital.
There is definitely less risk taking, but there is a big issue of perception. Things just don't seem mind blowing after a while, even if there is tons of work left to be done in that area. You see this again and again: cars got boring, planes got boring, nuclear energy got boring, space flight got boring. Everything gets boring eventually. Most computing related areas have lost their cultural edge. It's hard to pitch things as being innovative, even if they really are, and have people buy the idea.
Minor nit-pick: AOL is not a Silicon Valley company. It was an important company in the 90s .com boom, but it is east coast.
There was a huge technological explosion the previous decades, and now it is really hard to come up with original ideas. It seems like whatever was there to be discovered is already discovered. Now there is only room for renovation.
Take the human-computer interface, for example. We are stuck with GUIs for 3 decades. The face of GUIs has changed a lot, but that's only superficial; we have fancier displays now, and that's about it. We still click and drag, even if we do it with our fingers instead of a mouse. Our screens are still filled with buttons and input boxes, just like in the previous decades.
Why, oh why do you hate America?
That's the car that will save local businesses, letting them compete with Amazon on convenience and beat them on speed.
That's my future.
LOL!! It amazes me how people get high on this crap. Human drivers do not hobble small business any more than they do big business (hint: Amazon relies on human drivers). If anything, driverless cars would enable giants like Amazon to expand with myriad small distribution centers and put carriers like UPS out of business.
The only types of business they would be a boon to would be the ones that rely on production that is both local and diffuse-- like restaurants or dry cleaners. Even then, I'm not so sure these businesses would count driver pay as a huge chunk of their expenses.
Re: flying cars
FWIW computers are going in the opposite direction than the childish fantasies of armchair aviators-- more specialization.
Since it is the aim of the flying car enthusiasts to build a vehicle that can take off and land in a very short distance, then why not just design such an airplane and be done with it?? If being in the air is so good and feasible, what is the overriding need to hug the surface of roads at all?
Re: innovation
I increasingly get the impression mysticism or religion being preached to the converted with 'Innovation' used as a buzzword used to evoke esteem or reverence for the people who apply it; Its like 'Amen'.
There is no substantial difference in our day-to-day physical lives since the 1970s except for the following: The proliferation of microprocessors, an expansion of prescribed antipsychotic and antibiotic drugs, skyrocketing suburban sprawl and travel times, the expansion of the prison system and police powers in preference over schools, and the offshoring of labor. Add the effects of global warming to the list of what is increasingly noticeable. This is not the stuff of Futurism or Sci-Fi or the old technologists "progress" because nearly all of that was fantasy of the sort that could barely be given the veneer of scientific plausibility.
With a flow of dollars acting like prayer, the goal is to conjure up a second coming of the halcyon days and to finally fulfill the old prophecies (swarming cars to swarming flying cars to swarming spaceships) all the while further removing people's frame of mind from any sort of ecological context. And like some of the worst examples of religion today, we are told and suggested on many levels that all of this consumer fantasizing is scientific when mostly its dangerous bunk.
Patent's on Ideas should once again be ILLEGAL since they should have never been made legal.
This hinges on there being some sort of bright line between an "idea" and an "invention". A novel and non-obvious process for doing something is currently deemed an invention. I haven't seen any airtight definition of where an idea becomes a process. Any thoughts?
it's all in history books if you care to go read.
Which books about the history of the U.S. patent system do you recommend? I'll have to see if I can find them at a local library.
Really awesome way to argue there.
See, when you just acuse your opponent of being lazy and racist, you don't need to back up your claims with anything! It's the best way to argue because it requires no effort. Just go ahead and make accusations without any basis in reality, and you are sure to win!
Hey, if they're making money, who cares? Sounds like somebody likes what they're doing enough to pay money for their services. What James Temple doesn't realize, obviously, is that most people are just like that. There's very few true inventors and inventions, and most things are just copies of other things that are slightly modified.
Consider "The Hypocrisy In Silicon Valley's Big Talk On Innovation".
When I grew up, we sat on a chair, got off the seat, walked on the floor, turned on the light, were on topic or off topic, but we always were talking or writing about.
Should todays headline read "The Hypocrisy In Silicon Valley's Big Talk about Innovation"?
The existing headline did not turn me on.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I looked at your posting history to try to work out where the hell such weirdness came from, then from reading what I found there it appears that calling you out on such a stupid and misleading insult would be like kicking a puppy. Best of luck and I hope things improve.
Whoooooooooosh!
OK then - please tell me what movie, comic or TV show your joke depends on and you may come across as somewhat less pathetic and disturbed.