
The sad truth about Facebook - edw519
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/24/the-sad-truth-about-the-facebook-movie.html
======
DanielBMarkham
Two things. One positive and one negative.

Positive. The author understands the gist of what's going on. Places like YC
focus on Minimum Viable Product and doing just one thing that people want.
These are great and wise strategies for both investors and entrepreneurs, but
there's also another term for it that's not as flattering: bottom-feeding.
Going after the little bits of value here and there, not being a hunter,
existing by providing the least amount of value possible. There are huge
bottom-feeders! Facebook is one of them. But it's little tidbit work. Stuff
like reminding me when I like to scratch my nose, or a service for
recommending dog groomers.

Negative. The problem here is that the author seems to think he knows where
technology is headed, and that's always a foolish bet. His view is that we
should be making complex things and solving hard problems. While I agree that
hard problems need to be solved, I don't think you can decide ahead of time
which problems are going to be the ones that gain traction. This is like the
government or VCs "deciding" that one area of effort is going to give more
results than another. Nobody knows. This is the risk of startups. It's why the
smart move is to do the little stuff.

More to the point, there are two kinds of innovation (to steal from Kuhn).
There is "normal" innovation, where people take existing tech and put it
together in new ways to make trivially more usable things than existed before.
Then there is paradigm-changing innovation, where completely new things
appear.

By far, normal innovation is the norm. Probably 99.9% of all innovation is
normal. Maybe more. Systems change from the ground-up, not from the top-down.
Eventually a bunch of little things reach critical mass and a paradigm-
changing innovation occurs. But hell, most of the time you can't force the
little innovations to work, much less the big ones. I love the contrarian
tone, but it's just not a realistic article.

~~~
jacquesm
That read like two negatives to me.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I agree with the author's critique of the trivial nature of most start-ups.
Lots of guys are simply trying to make widgets more shiny, and that's a shame
because they could do so much more.

I disagree that there is something we can do about it. It's the natural state
of affairs.

(My rewrites always take 400-word explanations and turn them into 2 sentences.
Writing is much like code golf. Sigh)

~~~
zoomzoom
I agree that things seem more shiny than innovative. Maybe "easy" problems are
a natural way of increasing our general software competency across the general
population. Before we can get to the big-problem innovation in things like AI
and nano tech we have some steps to take. That probably explains why it a
seems so natural.

------
ugh
_“Facebook lets you keep in touch with your friends; for this profound service
to mankind it will generate about $1.5 billion in revenue this year by
bombarding its 500 million members with ads.“_

This statement seems very indicative of the author’s cluelessness or
hypocrisy. $1.5 billion from 500 million members means that they bombard each
member on average with $3 worth of ads every year. I’m bombarded with more ads
when buying three issues of Newsweek.

Facebook lets you keep in touch with your friends for $3 a year. That sounds
like quite an impressive feat to me. There is much that is wrong with Facebook
but I don’t think that they are making their money with ads is one of those
things.

------
mr_luc
Not only is the author a troll -- as pointed out, he runs the Fake Steve Jobs
blog -- his primary source, Nathan Myhyrvhvhlodold, is a troll.

Let me clarify:

Nathan might be a genius, but he's a genius whose words we can't ever risk
taking seriously because of the raging conflicts of interest that imbue his
every interaction with the press or social media.

His company:

> "Intellectual Ventures is a private company claiming to invest in "pure
> invention." Their business model has a focus on developing a large patent
> portfolio and licensing these to companies with infringing products."

Myhrvold brings smart scientists and thinkers into a room, picks their brains,
and then he and his own very smart people sit down and come up with as many
patents as they can.

They aren't driven by malice. They're driven by rational self-interest:
presently, with our broken patent system, people who aren't actually going to
go out there and try to solve the world's problems can sit in a room all day
coming up with ideas and make money from that.

Let's run his statements through a conflict-of-interest filter: "Silicon
Valley is working on easy problems" translates to:

> Hey world, it's only cool to work on things that require large up-front
> investment on PATENT-FRIENDLY products, so people with lots of patents can
> make money by attaching ourselves to the necks of people who are actually
> making the world a better place instead of talking about it.

Tempting, Nate.

More to the point, it's tempting to get sucked into rebutting individual
points, such as the fact that those heroes of the valley would have killed to
have the resources available now to anyone with a credit card, Linode and
Twilio.com. Or the fact that he's essentially complaining about low barriers
to entry.

Or the fact that things that start easy and trivial, in the early stages,
quickly get deep and techy. It's easy to mock things that look facebook-y, but
it's hard to solve, say, 10k or 100k continuous connections, or to write fast
evented code or contribute to libraries that make the whole world faster. We
start simple and get smart.

But if you start rebutting these things, you've been sucked into a hole.

The issue is, he wants people to work on patent-friendly stuff. Fin.

~~~
gaius
But _you can't patent an idea_ \- you have to have an implementation!

Srsly - you have fundamentally misunderstood what a patent is. If it's "a
method for mangling widgets" then you have to have built a real, working
widget mangler too, and include the blueprints in the patent application.

~~~
EdiX
This is not how the patent system currently works. Patents with broad
application are constantly issued that don't have nearly enough informations
attached to build a prototype of the invention (and the existence of said
prototype is not verified by the patent office).

------
dstein
A lot of people here seem to be calling foul. But whenever I read a list of
startups that YCombinator has funded the formula in every case is:

Clone of (X) Targeted For Audience (Y)

The article is correct about a lot of things. Angel investors (including YC)
don't really seem interested in investing in really game changing technology,
they're interested in following a trend by buying lotto tickets for a few
thousand dollars with the hopes that several will hit medium to large sized
jackpots in the shortest possible time frame.

------
alanh
I can’t believe the expert quoted in the article is none other than Myrhvold.
Now, I don’t know the guy, but I understand that his current line of work is
something to the effect of: Abuse the current software patent mess by suing
people who, you know, are actually creating things.

------
zaidf
Talk. About. A. Troll. (edit: ah, no wonder. the author is fake steve jobs
blogger)

This is almost as good as the article from the 90s making fun of the Internet
and how useless it is.

 _...a place where smart kids arrive hoping to make an easy fortune building
companies that seem, if not pointless, at least not as serious as, say, old-
guard companies like HP, Intel, Cisco, and Apple._

"Easy fortune" huh? That's what you call those 15-20 hours days many founders
pull? This writer owes an apology to the Valley.

Just another version of old dudes complaining about the new gen.

~~~
starpilot
If you're not aware, most of the old guard companies pulled 15-20 hour days
starting out too. And making a physical product is generally MUCH more
frustrating than anything in web app land. Hurrying up and waiting, for a
flawed product messed up by the machinists. Also much higher startup capital
costs for anything nontrivial like semiconductors. Expensive equipment, office
space, manufacturing space, all this stuff you need to start. Not just two or
three guys with open source software working in a dorm.

Studying the physical sciences is also more mentally taxing than coding PHP.
I've gotten paid for both. You can't compare designing aircraft in CAD and
Excel (what I do) that could kill someone if done improperly, with setting up
email verification for your social networking site. Not even close.

~~~
zaidf
Nothing I said belittles the efforts of past Valley heroes.

As for it becoming cheaper to do a start-up now versus previously, well _doh_.
That should not be an excuse to belittle today's start-ups as the author does
so recklessly.

And where is the discussion headed anyways? I am sure it was harder for
entrepreneurs in 1900 than 1950 on the whole.

 _Studying the physical sciences is also more mentally taxing than coding
PHP._

You make it sound like that is all a start-up is: some php code. Most
_successful_ start-ups are _a lot_ more than php code.

Also, having to _walk_ ten miles before we had a means of transportation was
more taxing than taking cars. What are we gonna do about that? Attack the
whole world for not having it as hard as when folks had to walk 10 miles?

------
iamelgringo
Complete poppycock.

Running Hackers and Founders SV, I think I have a pretty decent picture of
what Silicon Valley is like on the ground floor, and as far as I'm concerned
it's pretty frigging amazing.

There's tons of small teams doing amazing things with Big Data and real time
analytics like Factual (making Open Data easier to manage and use), MixPanel
(Real Time analytics for applications). There's a number of companies doing
really interesting things with cool languages like Clojure and Erlang, even if
they are "silly companies".

There's companies like Justin.TV which is the largest real time video
streaming company in the world. Real time video streaming is very, very hard
to do at scale.

AirBnB is revolutionizing the hospitality industry, and last I read are the
largest provider of rooms in New York.

There are amazingly cool companies working on SSD database appliances, and on
databases optimized specifically for SSD's. SSD add on cards for your PCIE
graphics slot that give you 6x the throughput of a SATA port. Those companies
don't exactly make for exiting reading in Newsweek, so they don't get a lot of
press, though.

Yeah, there's a lot of people making Facebook apps. Sure, you can mock twitter
because on it's surface it seems silly and trivial, but they have invented an
entirely new communication protocol which companies like StockTwits are
leveraging to allow individuals to broadcast their recent stock trades. And,
not only that, but the article says that Twitter hasn't figured out how to
make money yet. In fact, Business Week reports that they were profitable in
2009:
[http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc200...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc20091220_549879.htm)

Sure Zynga makes somewhat whimsical addictive games, but if you stop and
crunch the numbers, Farmville's digital economy is probably mlarger than the
real world economies of many developing nations.

So, if you'd like to believe that Silicon Valley has lost it's way go right
ahead. But, from where I sit, things are just beginning to get interesting.
Silicon Valley is just starting to fire on all cylinders since the tech bubble
popped in 2000. If you want to know how I'm seeing Silicon Valley: I'm
strapping in and getting ready for a great big ride.

~~~
timr
Yeah, this is one of those debates that's going to generate a lot of heat, but
not much light. Because, frankly, for every guy who thinks that it's a crime
that the valley isn't 95% about battery technology and semiconductor startups,
there's a guy who wants to breathlessly pronounce Twitter a _"new
communications protocol"_ (Twitter is a web service -- it uses the same
protocols as everyone else on the web -- and it's only "profitable" because it
made a few sweetheart, short-term deals with unclear renewal prospects).

There are certainly a few companies in the valley that are doing interesting
R&D, but I tend to agree with the article that the vast majority of the _crap
we hear about_ on a day-to-day basis is fluff. It may be "Big Data" fluff, but
it's still fluff, and popularity doesn't make it less fluffy.

From a technology perspective, cranking out database-backed web pages is a
completely uninteresting problem. For that matter, so are most of the common
"big data" applications (grinding through log files), or revolutionary
companies (where the "revolution" usually boils down to killing a more
traditional market...with a database-backed web app). Meanwhile,
industrialists in other countries are developing more efficient wind turbines,
new electronics manufacturing techniques, battery chemistry with greater
capacity, and they're also investing hundreds of billions of dollars into
pharmaceutical research. From a technological perspective, it's not even in
the same universe.

~~~
iamelgringo
I certainly understand and respect that these technologies are uninteresting
to you.

At the same time in the past month, I've talked with government officials from
2 fairly developed countries, because they are trying to learn what makes
Silicon Valley tick. In both cases, they understand that they will never be
able to compete with Silicon Valley, but at very least, they want to cross
pollinate their technology sector with ours.

I noticed that your profile says that you work at Yelp. I'd respectfully
suggest that I haven't seen tons of interesting R&D happen up in San
Francisco. There are an inordinate number of social media companies and iPhone
app companies up at the tip of the peninsula. But, I tend to hang out in Mt
View, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Palo Alto, and there's a much different flavor
to the companies down here.

------
nadam
Maybe this article is a PR piece. But I agree with that 'social' and non
technology-focused startup ideas are overvalued currently by young
enterpreneurs, by the media and by investors. As if those problems which
existed 10-20 years ago would not exist anymore. As if those problems
currently solved by 'old companies' and generating incredible amount of money,
could not be solved better by some startups. Not enough startups are competing
_directly_ against those old products like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop,
etc... Not enough young companies are based on deep technology. Almost
everyone want to be rich quickly adding very little technology-wise to
exisitng open-source stuff like Ruby on Rails. To use Zed's terminology I am
half a 'long beard' half a 'product guy'. So I am trying to create something
which is a product for people, but potentially can go quite deep technology-
wise.

------
HappySushiCo
Build things that people will ultimately find useful...

as opposed to products that are conducive to a quick sell to the angels and
VCs.

Build a product that can potentially make money on its own merit. A 2 million
dollar series A round should not be considered as a sign of a successful
startup.

This article does raise some valid points (regardless of the intentions of the
writer). Strike the part about Intellectual Ventures because it unfortunately
overshadows the main point.

------
bbgm
While I think there is some truth in the article, and the lack of innovation
in SV, one should probably remind the author that some of the more interesting
pure technology startups are still SV based. To pick two close to my interests

Complete Genomics: <http://www.completegenomics.com/> Pacific Biosciences:
<http://www.pacificbiosciences.com/> Tilera: <http://tilera.com> (started out
of MIT but now in San Jose)

There is a lot more "noise" out there just because it's easier. I suspect it
would have been the same in the past if the capital required was lower. That
said we should be asking ourselves if what we are doing has a purpose? I meet
too many people with a good "idea" but no purpose, and in the long term that
might become a problem.

------
mechanical_fish
This article is full of it, but for more reasons than have been articulated so
far.

One problem is that the article mistakes light for heat. Just because they get
less press than Facebook doesn't mean that old-school high-tech engineering
startups don't exist. Facebook _et al_ are focused like a laser on getting
their names out. That is what social networking _is_ : word-of-mouth viral
publicity. Whereas most hardware startups are born below the radar, and the
majority die below the radar, and many of the successful ones get bought out
by bigger companies and never rise above the radar under their own name. But
that doesn't mean they don't exist. Some statistics would have been nice.

The balance of companies has shifted a _lot_ over time, but that's because
computing has grown and matured. Back in the 1970s Silicon Valley's only
customers were nerds. That meant a lot of emphasis on nerdly products. H-P
calculators. Oscilloscopes. Chipsets. After thirty years of work on mobile
phones, broadband networking, and UX design, we've improved computing to the
point where there are now many Valley firms whose customers are non-nerdly
iPhone owners and Web users. That's a huge number of people. And it turns out
that you can make as much gross revenue by selling a $2.99 app directly to 2
billion people as you can by selling a $2.99 part to a firm that will make 2
billion mobile phones, but the former requires much more marketing and makes a
lot more noise.

But the big problem with this article is that it is trying to blame a forest-
management problem on the individual leaves. If the USA is not investing
enough resources in "alternative energy, better batteries, and
nanotechnology", don't blame Silicon Valley startup culture. That's putting
the cart before the horse. Entrepreneurs go where the money is, and who
controls how much money goes into cutting-edge hardware research? The
government, mostly. Either directly (by giving out research grants) or
indirectly (by providing an artificial "market" with a single customer --
often the Department of Defense, but sometimes an entity like NASA -- that
happily commits to spending money on the very latest high-tech toys; or by
creating and enforcing the incentives that drive the market for, e.g.,
alternative energy).

The Internet got developed because the government commissioned it. Rocket
technology got developed because the government commissioned and bought it.
H-P and Intel became big companies by selling equipment and parts to the high-
tech companies that sold to the government. The nanotech researchers I know
are paid by the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, or
the National Science Foundation. Biotech research? Funded by the NIH or the
DoD. Alternative energy? The size of our research efforts have tended to wax
and wane with the size of the DoE budget; the economics of deploying
alternative energy have everything to do with the cost of oil and gas
(determined by forces outside of an entrepreneur's control, like taxes, and
tax-funded highway projects, and tax-funded transportation projects, and
zoning policy, and tax-funded military maneuvers, and government-mediated
international agreements) and the extent of environmental regulation
(determined by government and politics).

If you want to address these problems you must first analyze them correctly.
If you're a rag like _Newsweek_ it's easy and fun to pick on Mark Zuckerberg,
but the real problem is economic and research policy: We've got an economy
with flat or declining demand and lots of excess capacity (I, for one, could
certainly be talked into applying my Ph.D. in EE to alternative energy
problems instead of to PHP applications... if the price was right) yet our
government officials are perversely engaged in an effort to further _depress_
demand and _raise_ our excess capacity by cutting spending. I wonder if there
are any magazines that are ostensibly devoted to discussing problems in
society, government and policy, instead of trading in mindless gossip, cheap
shots, and PR hit pieces?

~~~
rbanffy
> If the USA is not investing enough resources in "alternative energy, better
> batteries, and nanotechnology"

It's not the government's primary job to fund innovation. What we are seeing
is that innovation is unable to sustain itself without government money.

There is a marketplace for alternative energy, better batteries and
nanotechnology. This reminds me of AI. AI is all around us, yet, we don't call
it AI anymore except for marketing purposes. So will AE, batteries and
nanotech.

~~~
poet
_It's not the government's primary job to fund innovation. What we are seeing
is that innovation is unable to sustain itself without government money._

You've got this backwards. It is specifically the government's job to fund
innovation is currently is commercially untenable. Otherwise, who else would
do it? Often times after the government's grant expires, the innovation is
still commercially untenable. This makes sense because the research is
exclusively targeting projects whose commercial viability is unclear. But
other times we get things like the Internet, GPS, etc.

Now we can have a long and interesting discussion about specifies; i.e.,
whether said research is worth it in the long run, how soon should certain
technologies be cut off, etc. But the fact that the government is funding
technology that isn't able to sustain itself without government money is not a
negative thing; that's exactly what the government is meant to do.

~~~
WalterBright
I suppose everyone has forgotten about all the privately developed and
deployed networks before the internet as we know it - BIX, Prodigy, MCImail,
Fidonet, UUCP, Telenet, the BBS systems, etc. To presume that without the
ARPAnet there would be no internet is a huge stretch.

~~~
poet
All the networks you listed are circuit switched, centralized networks; they
really don't have anything to do with the Internet at all. The claim that
without ARPAnet there would be no Internet is almost self evident, considering
how fundamentally different the networks you listed are from the Internet.
There's no way a commercial entity would have had the same design philosophy
[1, Section 3] because a commercial entity has much different motivations.

As an aside, the best example that you could have given would have been
Minitel (but still, centralized and circuit switched).

[1]
[http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark...](http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf)

~~~
WalterBright
Most of those networks also evolved gateways to interconnect to each other.
The history of technology is often one that starts out with proprietary
interfaces that evolve under user pressure to standardized, open interfaces.
We see that playing out yet again in the iPhone vs Android competition.

As soon as there were two computers, people tried to connect them. The more
they got connected, the more universal people wanted those connections to be.
If commercial companies wouldn't do it, non-commercial entities would (after
all, look at linux and the enormous success of free software). Heck, even _I_
worked on hooking computers together back in the 70's using ad-hoc parts and
wires and (never having heard of arpanet at the time) even sketched out how a
decentralized "web" might work.

The idea that a decentralized fault tolerant network is such a novel concept
that it required a government to think of it doesn't make a whole lot of
sense. Even the telephone system is decentralized. There are decentralized
fault tolerant systems all around us as examples.

~~~
poet
_The idea that a decentralized fault tolerant network is such a novel concept
that it required a government to think of it doesn't make a whole lot of
sense. Even the telephone system is decentralized. There are decentralized
fault tolerant systems all around us as examples._

It doesn't require the government to think of it, it requires the government
to implement it. It would be a massively stupid decision from a business point
of view to implement the Internet as it exists today. There's much more money
in centralized networks. I think this should be obvious from the fact that (1)
at the time all commercial companies were building centralized networks and
(2) today text messages cost upwards of $1k per megabyte. The only reason why
the Internet is architected the way it is today is because of government
funding. One the government set the Internet in motion towards a
decentralized, packet switched network, it could not be overcome by commercial
companies.

~~~
WalterBright
FidoNet is the counterexample that shows the government was not required to
implement a global, decentralized, fault tolerant network.

Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant
network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols.

~~~
CamperBob
_Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant
network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols._

Which phone network are you talking about? Certainly not any I'm familiar
with.

I'm no evangelist for government-financed R&D, but I don't think you could
possibly have picked a worse example
(<http://www.corp.att.com/history/history3.html>) for your argument.

------
rbanffy
It's kind of amusing to watch the ad-hominem arguments take flight.

While it's true Daniel Lyons is Fake Steve Jobs and that Nathan Myhrvold runs
a company focused on thinking up ideas that could lead to products _after_
some research and patent them before spending a dime making any real progress
beyond writing them down, while at the same time extorting those who do, the
argument against companies like Facebook or Zynga stand: what are they doing
to improve the human condition? Are they doing more or less than companies
like HP, Intel, Cisco, Apple and Google?

~~~
chopsueyar
Not sure if you were paying attention, but Zuckerberg was on Oprah, and he is
giving the state of New Jersey $100 million in Facebook stock, in a matching
grant.

How much stock has Google given NJ?

</sarcasm>

------
rubyrescue
Reads like a PR piece written by Myrhvold...

------
tapp
“If we distract people with the lure of easy money... we’re going to wind up
derailing the thing that has been driving our economy”

It seems to me that if one were sincerely worried about this, the concern
would be better directed at Wall Street, where many of the world's best minds
go to be wasted on creating the next CDO or HFT/computerized-frontrunning
technique while contributing nothing back to the world.

------
rblion
“the unknown engineers and professors who have good ideas. Are those people
going to get funded or will they be talked out of it and told they should do
something like Zynga, because virtual goods is where it’s at these days?”

------
nir
One reason I like HN is that comments seem to lean more towards the Perceptive
(vs Judgmental) end of the scale in the Myers-Briggs sense, compared to other
sites. So it's sad to see many of the responses in this thread.
Myhrvold/Lyons/Newsweek aren't the issue here, the issue is what you choose to
do with your life.

In 1983 Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi's president to Apple by asking him to
choose between changing the world and selling sugared water. Much of Valley's
current output is closer to sugared water than to the Macintosh.

~~~
chopsueyar
_In 1983 Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi's president to Apple by asking him to
choose between changing the world and selling sugared water. Much of Valley's
current output is closer to sugared water than to the Macintosh._

Beautiful summation.

------
DamonOehlman
I'm sure that the message of both the movie and this spin-off piece are skewed
towards fantasy and there is great work coming out of SV all the time.

But let's face it innovation doesn't decide to shack up in one place, settle
down and have a couple of kids, calling one place home for the rest of it's
existence.

Hubs of both engineering and social innovation will dwarf SV in coming years.
The only question is where...

------
patrickgzill
Newsweek, a/k/a the poster boy of declining circulation, (from 3.1 million in
2007 to 1.5 or less in 2010) lecturing others on how to run their business?

(source: [http://idsgn.org/posts/newsweek-can-a-redesign-save-a-
dying-...](http://idsgn.org/posts/newsweek-can-a-redesign-save-a-dying-
magazine/) )

------
rahooligan
I think Twitter has immense value. And I would be happy to see it go public
and achieve $billions in market cap. Cant say the same thing about facebook or
zynga.

sometimes i feel like facebook is that waste-of-my-time show that i get pulled
into when i switch on my tv. it sucks up time from my life i will never get
back.

~~~
nkohari
Twitter has a strong impact on our culture, but without a rational business
model, and several quarters of profitable growth, an IPO will never happen. I
certainly wouldn't buy stock in a company which doesn't know how to make
money, no matter how impactful their product is.

~~~
rahooligan
my bet is twitter will figure out monetization. im sure they have something in
the works. look at ad.ly for instance - instream advertising. they seem to be
doing well.

------
dasil003
So essentially his argument is that he prefers industry work to flashy
consumer plays. I can't say I disagree. The only thing is that there's no
indication that the "serious" stuff is any less significant than it was 50
years ago. Yeah, you have Madison Ave layered on top now thanks to the
mainstream adoption of the internet, but should _everyone_ just leave that
money on the table in the name of "science"?

------
seldo
_Twitter is a noisy circus of spats and celebrity watching, and its hapless
founders still can’t figure out how to make money._

Anybody who says this is clearly just trolling, since everyone knows they are
making a ton of money selling the data to the search engines before they even
get started on the advertising, which they are working on. And as for "twitter
is for celebrity watching", that meme died a year ago.

------
nervechannel
One might point out the irony of this being posted on a site called "Hacker
News" where many of the most popular posts are about venture capitalists,
investment, business models blah-di-blah-di-blah.

------
praeclarum
Geeze, does this guy understand the word prosperity?

We should be happy that "the computer problem" is solved (at least for now).
Computer technology has plateaued and there is no hard engineering required
right now. This is a good thing! It gives us time to experiment with software.
So Silicon has gone the way of Northeast Steel. So what if the world changes?

If you want to do hard engineering, you go to the fields that require it - war
inc. (looking for more efficient ways to kill our neighbors), space flight
(the modern space race is exciting), industrial automation (eventually the
populace of Asia will want to climb out of indentured servitude and we need to
replace them with something). These fields still need smart engineers and big
$ startups.

------
shadowsun7
A response: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729035>

------
houseabsolute
Don't we have to first establish that Silly Valley has lost its stride before
talking about how it happened?

------
varjag
> We’ve already fallen behind in areas like alternative energy, better
> batteries, and nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology? You can't fall behind in vaporware.

------
tlrobinson
Stopped reading at "says Nathan Myhrvold".

------
Aetius
Yeah, it would be easier innovate on hard problems, Mr. Myhrvold, if you you
weren't trying to strangle startups and small tech firms every chance you get
with your _Intellectual Ventures_.

~~~
paraschopra
I'm not sure, but is his company every sued any startup for patent
infringement. I read about his company in super-Freakonomics and he seemed to
be genuinely caring about solving hard, big problems. He may be amassing
patents to get protection but unless he actively screws small companies by
buying patents, I'm not sure I would call his company a patent troll.

~~~
prodigal_erik
They create and acquire patents for revenue, not defense. They don't need
protection from infringement suits because they don't sell any products (and
their research should fall within US patent law's exemption for that purpose).
There's also speculation they have backed some infringement suits raised by
shell companies.

I'm torn. There ought to be some way to compensate researchers for actually
solving hard problems (here I'm excluding a lot of poorly-examined software
patents which basically claim the whole problem via the obvious solution) yet
doesn't involve giving them an exclusive stranglehold on anyone using their
work even accidentally.

~~~
jacquesm
The cure is worse than the disease at this point, the situation is such that
the patents to tend to go overwhelmingly to those that troll rather than to
those that have ideas and actually implement them.

That's kind of logical too, after all having an idea and writing it up in a
patentable form is much less work than following through so while the 'doers'
are stuck on their first one the 'patenters' are on their 10th or more.

------
lotusleaf1987
Myhrvold is a known patent troll, even going so far as to sue the same
companies multiple times under shell companies:
<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml> Why anyone cares
what this guy says is beyond me. The author says Myhrvold runs 'an invention
lab'... yeah not exactly. A better term would be patent extortionist:
[http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/17/nathan-myhrvolds-patent-
ext...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/17/nathan-myhrvolds-patent-extortion-
fund-is-reaping-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars/) Here's another article for
good measure: <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060626/1011256.shtml>

------
sabat
SV innovation was once about creating the technological infrastructure that we
all take for granted. Now, it's about using that technology in new,
interesting ways to see what might happen.

I have met and spent time with Dan, before he became such a cynic. He was
excited about the idea of being near startups and wanted to come up with an
idea for his own. What I see when I read his pieces is sadness,
disappointment. While I can't blame him, we should understand his point of
view in context: he could-a been a contender.

------
grails4life
Nathan Myhrvold is also a patent troll:

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/132174/ubuntu_microsoft_is_pa...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/132174/ubuntu_microsoft_is_patent_pal.html)

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zuggywugg
finally, someone who shares my opinion!

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johnconroy
A powerfully retarded article, if I may say so

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bretthellman
Someone was having a bad day or something...

~~~
neolefty
Couldn't get the kids off his lawn? I can totally sympathize.

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qthrul
The correct URL for this piece is actually:

<http://bit.ly/Daniel-Lyons-Link-Bait>

HTH.YMMV.VWP.

