The Hypocrisy In Silicon Valley's Big Talk On Innovation 208
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."
Re:Innovation has been killed by overzealous IP (Score:4, Informative)
"public sector pension funds which are desperately seeking excess profits to make good on political promises to government retirees."
A pension is not a political promise. A pension, whether in the public or private sectors, is an agreement between employer and employees.
Re:how do you make money if you don't sell anythin (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:What happend with trillions lost in Silicon Val (Score:2, Informative)
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.