- With all the venture capital moving around in the Silicon Valley, where is the real innovation?
He makes many good points especially that there is a lot of money flowing into companies that only offer incremental improvements over what is already available.
The situation may leave the technology industry in another downward spiral if none of the “incremental” ventures hit it big and no other genuine innovation appears soon.
But what is next?
As I survey the landscape of consumer- and business- focused software and service providers I am struck by how much incrementalism there is at the moment. Something like Twitter is ground breaking in terms of breakout adoption, but what about the other 10,000 startups? There are few bold “aha” ideas, lot’s of social “-this or -that”, and mostly a bunch of companies hoping to draft on the perceived success of a few gorillas. . .
. . .The venture capital will no doubt continue to flow to these companies in the hopes that a few will rise to the top and get acquired. With the melt down in non-VC private equity I am sure that institutional investors will surge back into VC with abandon and this will prop up the Valley for the foreseeable future.
But I’m still left with the uncomfortable question of “What’s next?” When Facebook doesn’t deliver world peace, and FriendFeed fails to be better than sliced bread, what will we do?
This last one produced a two-way communications technology platform based on RSS (a blogging platform) that led to the flood of collaboration apps known as Web 2.0. The next big thing will emerge from the same roots. Because it is during a recession that we have time to think about and invest in the next generation of innovation. Intel (an SVW sponsor) makes its investments in chip fabs during the bust cycle in the chip industry, then when the boom cycle comes it is ready to crank out tens of millions of chips.
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