> A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technology”.
I'm not critical of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley includes many companies working on hard problems, or investing money into long-term moonshot programs.
The criticism is levied towards, for example, the social media giants that pull in top engineers to work on social media problems exclusively. The criticism is also directed at Silicon Valley VCs, who lure smart young people to work on semi-trivial problems because it's the quickest path to profit.
It's not necessarily fair criticism. VCs have an incentive, first and foremost, to fund successful businesses. If their surest path to success in today's economy involves building semi-trivial apps, that's what they'll pursue. The same can be said for the finance industry, where the most successful players are employing our nation's top mathematicians and scientists to extract money from public markets using high-frequency trading. We can't expect them to self-regulate. But how can we incentivize smart people to work on something less lucrative?
Some of the criticism has just been that there's kind of a category error being made: not that these aren't good businesses, but that they aren't really tech companies, and calling them "tech companies" is more of a PR move. For example AirBnB is a successful business, but very little of its success has to do with technology it builds. It certainly operates in a field shaped by technology, and does need some amount of technology to operate the business (a website, some billing infrastructure, etc., roughly technology on par with any airline or hotel company). But, like Wal-mart a generation earlier, its success comes mainly from noticing that ongoing changes in technology and purchase habits open up new kinds of business opportunities as a specific kind of intermediary, and pushing hard to exploit that market opening.
Craigslist is perhaps an even more pure example of that, a "technology company" where having almost no actual technology, beyond the very basic level of "a webpage", is kind of their ethos.
I think this criticism comes from not understanding how much of a positive effect social media has on a modern world. There have been a lot of discussion of the negative sides of twitter, facebook, instagram and others, but the positive effects are either so positive that they don't warrant a discussion or so hidden that no one really has patience to research them properly.
I'm not critical of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley includes many companies working on hard problems, or investing money into long-term moonshot programs.
The criticism is levied towards, for example, the social media giants that pull in top engineers to work on social media problems exclusively. The criticism is also directed at Silicon Valley VCs, who lure smart young people to work on semi-trivial problems because it's the quickest path to profit.
It's not necessarily fair criticism. VCs have an incentive, first and foremost, to fund successful businesses. If their surest path to success in today's economy involves building semi-trivial apps, that's what they'll pursue. The same can be said for the finance industry, where the most successful players are employing our nation's top mathematicians and scientists to extract money from public markets using high-frequency trading. We can't expect them to self-regulate. But how can we incentivize smart people to work on something less lucrative?