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Comment by david927 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is so defensive that no one is really listening to what the author is saying. He's saying that SV used to be about driving innovation, not making money. Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga are all silly companies that won't be around in 10 years, and none make changes in improving our productivity. We don't do more with less because of these companies. The opposite, they provide us with entertainment. That's great, but it's not the core value that SV was founded on and it's not what's going to last.

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You're wrong and I'm happy to bet against you.

Proof points: 1. Tencent QQ is a Chinese social network for games. It's essentially Facebook+Zynga combined. Many of the top games on Facebook are ports of popular Chinese games, e.g., the farming genre. Tencent has been around for 12 years and did over $1Bn in revenue in 2009, representing a 61% increase in profits.

2. Over 500MM people use Facebook every month. That demand doesn't just disappear. The only way Facebook is going to lose is if someone comes along and gives people something better to do with their time.

3. Facebook has their pick of engineering talent in Silicon Valley. If you're an engineer looking ad a mid-sized startup, Facebook is the best place to work, hands down. Look at their open source projects (e.g., Cassandra.). How about their PHP compiler? Or their numerous patches to memcache? It's clearly an engineering-driven company.

4. Just because you think something is frivolous doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Was Atari frivolous? Electronic Arts? EA, obviously, is still around and immensely profitable. Moreover, the same VC that backed those companies also backed Apple, Oracle, and NVIDIA.

There are plenty of startups working on problems lower on the stack. One can innovate at any level -- why is Minecraft any less valuable than a video game that pushes the limits of modern 3D algorithms?

Was Facebook less innovative than PayPal? Oracle?

Personally, I think the attitude you show in your response is a defense mechanism. You feel like you're somehow "above" Facebook and therefore their success isn't valid.

At 1400 employees and four international headquarters, is Facebook really considered a mid-sized startup? To me that phrase evokes a few dozen people who took a sublet last year....

I don't want to trash any particular company. The thing about simple and obvious business models which satisfy a basic need is that they're easy to replicate. My view is that every so often one company hits on a mix of utility and accessibility that satisfies enough people's needs well enough that the firm becomes a giant of the industry...arguably, it becomes an industry unto itself, so well-known and well-liked that an entire ecosystem grows up around serving the needs of its users.

But the the frontier expands, and the very high integration which formerly proved such a huge advantage is now a source of inertia.

How many of us here have signed onto CompuServe or AOL lately? How many competitors did they leave dying in the dirt? They linger on, but as strange undead shadows of themselves. Apparently a few people are still willing to pay $199/year to sustain that pioneer feeling, but I doubt I'm missing anything: http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/menu/

Zynga is about entertainment, yes. But where'd you get the idea that the entertainment industry won't stand the test of time? For as long as there's been currency, people have been paying to be entertained. This trend is only getting stronger with each passing decade, as technological improvements give us more free time to kill, and as the Earth's population grows. It's hardly a "silly" industry to be involved in as a business. As for innovation, just stop and consider the fact that the average social media gamers is a middle-aged woman[1]. Compare entertainment today to how it was 10 years ago, and you'll realize Zynga (well, the companies it steals from) innovates quite a bit.

Facebook and Twitter are less about entertainment and more about communication. Facebook lets me communicate and "share" with the people who've come and gone in my life in a way that's never been possible. And for those who use it well, Twitter is an invaluable source of relevant up-to-date information, straight from the mouths of the experts/authorities that you respect. As far as transforming the world goes, communication is a MAJOR area to innovate in, because it tends to bring people close together who were once far away and alien. This has profound effects on culture, government, etc (see: telegraph, radio, telephone, television, etc).

The way I see it, the web is a naturally advantageous platform for innovation in these industries and more, and now it's finally maturing. The startups blowing up today are merely the ones taking advantage of this fact.

[1] http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-ye...

Zynga is about wasting time in a fantasy farm. What is innovative about it? Flash games have existed since more than a decade.

Zynga successfully makes Flash games played by a) women b) over the age of 40 who c) use them with their friends in d) a social context to e) supplement existing social grooming rituals while f) being successfully, aggressively monetized by g) a well-oiled metrics machine with h) offline components.

I think you're just easily impressed, Patrick. :)

My point stands: their products decrease productivity, not increase it. That it's successful is great but it's not "innovative" in the stronger sense we're talking about here.

Hollywood is about wasting time in a fantasy story. What is innovative about it? Plays have existed since more than a couple centuries.

Zynga games have never really been played on a scale such as this before, leveraging social reciprocation as a way to entice the user to keep playing. I think if they're smart about it, they can find new game mechanics on this scale that wasn't available to games before.

What's so innovative about the Internet? Means of communication have existed for many, many decades.

Are you kidding? Facebook makes keeping in touch with old friends much more efficient. Twitter makes the distribution of ideas or links to news or ideas more efficient.

It may be what people do on there is silly, but like this article says, the infrastructure software released by these companies have to deal with the number of users at scale is no easy feat.

I know facebook and twitter regularly release open source software for infrastructure. Thrift from facebook (and I think Cassandra). And FlockDB from Twitter, if I'm not mistaken. Every other startup's boats rise due to these companies dealing with silly things.

That definitely does happen, but there does seem to be a decrease in companies built on tech innovation as their product. Infrastructure innovation while scaling up a product is still great, but somewhat different from inventing a technically new thing as the product.

Not that classic Silicon Valley necessarily got the balance right, either: Xerox PARC is the canonical example of a place that was closer to 95% R&D, and 5% shipping profitable products based on that tech. But it seems at least possible that many companies are now swung towards the opposite side: 5% on inventing new tech, and 95% focus on productifying/monetizing existing tech by making nicely polished implementations, pushing it into new market segments, etc.

That might also be fine so long as there's a bunch of unexploited tech lying out there, waiting for someone to turn it into profitable products, but who's going to keep replenishing those stocks of unexploited tech? Will that kind of R&D come exclusively from academic research and a few big industrial labs like MSR?

I think this is just the pendulum swinging back and forth. you'll get these cycles, as first, we innovate on basic tech, and then polish it and tighten it up, before innovating on basic tech again.

Basic tech is still there. I think it's hard to know where to look, because like I said elsewhere, things that significantly change our lives in the future start off looking like toys, and not all toys end up significantly changing our lives.

It only seems like we have no basic tech because we're either not looking there, or we're writing it off.

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