Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

The Valley today strikes me as more of a Hollywood North, a media and marketing center, rather than an innovation center. Most new Valley ventures I see (Pinterest anyone?) strike me more as "web media productions" than tech ventures. There's no new technology there.

Google seems to be the last tech innovator in the valley with the Goggles, self-driving cars, etc. I really see Google as the last actual technology company to come out of the tech boom of the 1990s. There hasn't been much since, at least not in the Valley.

Further South you have Tesla and SpaceX, and you have some ventures elsewhere.

View on HN

I think yours is the best explanation I've seen in this thread.

It's not that innovation has stopped, but rather that it has been focused in a very narrow niche as of late: the advertising niche. Everyone seems to be doing something in advertising, whether it's brokering ads or harvesting eyeballs. Most of these seem to be in the perennially doomed space of "we will invent something unrelated to advertising and try to shoehorn an ad-based business model into it".

This is also why when a not-ad-related web business starts up we fall all over ourselves - AirBnb, Square, etc.

You're falling victim to a common mistake people make when they rely on anecdotal evidence to answer this question. Consumer apps by their nature are more popular, and you're thus more likely to have heard of them.

Any debate about "technology" will devolve into definitions, but here's a (possibly incomplete) list of top private IT for anyone that wants to draw their own conclusions: http://www.businessinsider.com/2012-digital-100?op=1

Since most of these are e-commerce, social networks, media, and advertising companies, I'm not convinced we're doing a good job making new technology.

Tesla's headquarters is in Palo Alto.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors

"media productions..." the stuff that can be done on the cheap by: (Somewhere, tinkerers in a garage are producing the first highly inefficient specimens of the next Big Thing. But where – and what? ) - from article -

"what" will happen but will it happen in the valley?

Will we ever have a major advance in SW development? If so I think it will require massive research & resources: perhaps somewhere in asia.

Here is a list of some notable shops in SV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Notable_companie...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com