tastybites

How a typical business person thinks: "If I can take 1% of each of my 5 competitors' market share, I can make $x millions. Better head over to EDGAR and read some 10-K reports."

How uber-startups like Google and Facebook think: "If I can take the majority of all of my competitors market share through superior marketing and technology, and increase the size of the market at the same time, then we're worth $XX billions."

Notice how you don't have to invent anything completely new, just innovate on existing stuff that's proven to make money.

If you've seen Steve Blank's presentation on the 'secret history' of Silicon Valley you'll see where I draw the parallels. Lockheed Martin, Rocketdyne, General Dynamics, Litton, Rockwell, and many others were once based there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

But the divergence was inevitable I suppose - the valley up north has gotten comparatively nicer in the past 15 years, though, as San Fernando's fortunes have faded a bit. The SF valley now basically lacks a coherent high technology business base and all the aerospace and defense has moved out. It's been replaced by Hollywood entertainment, healthcare, porno, import/export, and a bunch of other smaller industries and some light manufacturing. It's not defunct in any way - it's still pretty nice, but it's just not as nice as up north. Most of the newer wealth is in other areas of LA.

Both are nearly entirely made up of suburban housing and low laying office parks and are situated just outside of the main urban area. The biggest/tallest buildings are the chain hotels and a select few office buildings. Strip malls are everywhere, which is where all the good food is.

It's an interesting kind of an 'alternate reality' in the other end of California that many people aren't aware of. Personally I'd rather live bayside in Santa Monica or San Francisco (and have in both), but to each his own, some people like the suburbs more.

i.e., can you make your time slow down by coming to a full and complete "stop" in space, since I assume nothing in the universe is truly at rest?

This is the person who jumped to mind first.

Guess how you get there.

It's always hilarious to see rich white people talking about how the poor asian people need to be living their lives.

Basically they are the antithesis of everything HN "stands for", if you could paint with a broad brush.

Defined an industry, an era, and put LA entertainment on the map for internet media. SOLD.

$580 million.

Overtaken by facebook, written in PHP by some kid in his dorm room, idea probably stolen and financed through fraud and deception. Horrendous privacy regime. Redefining the industry, put the northeast on the map for startup incubation.

Worth billions.

Do I even need to go into Twitter? Scaling difficulties on physical servers managed by NTT Verio, as old school as it gets. Not a cloud for miles.

Such is the way of the world. All of these companies addressed user needs and came out on top, all of them had nothing to do with development methodologies or preferred platforms.

IBM, KPMG, PwC, etc. are all service businesses that are massive and successful. There's a thousand other firms with middling market caps you've never heard of that also make billions.

Once purchasers start leveraging to purchase a good or service, price elasticity goes way up. Not to mention both are part of the classical 'American dream'.

You weren't funny at all, just obnoxious.

Facebook employs less than 3000 people. Apple less than 50k. The underemployment rate in the US is over 15%. That's millions and millions of people without work. Is John Doerr single handedly going to put all these people to work?

How about Obama talk to a group of executives from mid-cap or small-cap private and publicly traded companies run by not-any-less real business people who employ MILLIONS of people on a daily basis?

This billionaire hero worship is just so over the top and short sighted. The real economy of everyday goods and services is SO much bigger and just as important than consumer devices and social networking.

Mapping the commands (lisp-based DSL if I remember correctly...) to left-hand-only single key macros while your right hand moused the coordinates on the canvas ... holy crap was that fast. You could whip up fully qualified engineering drawings in a matter of minutes.

But in reality, in any organization of sufficient size, you have a lot of people who don't actually do anything creative clamoring to capture that excess value generated by the people at the bottom (and at the top!). These are the people you are trying to push out, not the productive, well compensated people.

I can definitely appreciate the work, as I'm a business owner. I know this kind of objectivity is a bit strange, but I have both employees and clients, so I see both sides of the table on a regular basis. I'm just calling it like I see it.

I make it my mission in my professional life to capture as much of that value as I can and do with it as I see fit. Which usually means spending it in productive ways with businesses that enrich the community.

The web is not computing.