As the rest of the United States falls into the depths of economic turmoil, Silicon Valley has set itself apart as untouchable and immune to despair. But, according to The New York Times today, Silicon Valley's protective bubble, it seems, has been pinpricked.
The Times cites several factors suggesting that Silicon Valley -- despite its assumed superhuman strength -- is faltering under the weight of a slowing economy: Job growth has slowed; investors are acting frugal; acquisitions of small startups by large companies are on the decline; fewer companies are going public; Mark Zuckerberg has stopped wearing Adidas sandals... (just kidding about that last one -- things aren't that bad! Whew!)
Does any of this sound familiar?
We've been predicting the second coming of the bursting bubble all along. In fact, our reader survey back in ye olde December showed that the majority of IE readers, too, expect the worst. And this burst seems all the more inevitable now that we're facing a slumping economy, with people fearful of investing in what once were the most stable markets.
"In Silicon Valley, we don't do recession, we do reinvention," says Hayes who was the founding CEO and chairman of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, which, he says, led the Valley out of its downturn in the 1990s.
"There are myriad projects underway right now in every corner of the Valley... In a converse, perhaps, perverse way, brief economic pullbacks are good for growth economies like ours," he says. "Give us another 100 days and you will see what I mean. The flow of new products and applications coming out of our labs and fabs will be awe-inspiring."
Paul, I absolutely agree with you. Bubble collapses are like forest fires - devastating at the time but necessary to ensure the continued balance of nature. The coming/current bubble bursting will put paid to an awful lot of the more annoying Web 2.blow nonsense (Twitter, IE) as well as adjusting Google's position in the Internet universe back to a more realistic level.-Insultant
well,the real economics has its cycle of increasing and decreasing and might it be that silicon valley is a very real and correct example of the "right economical model"?
Martin Luther King Jr. once said intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education. The spirited comments attached to this post showed intelligence and character and ideally for various individuals there were several positive bits that could be taken away.
Will individuals, businesses and organizations that operate on the side of good, increasingly go beyond punishing each other? Does input from multiple sources (e.g., from technology users on the farm and within the big cities) have the potential to uncover (or to be a catalyst for uncovering) essential characteristics to help make things better?
Recognizing the importance of economics and statements which say businesses exist to make money, it may be good to revisit these words whether a business is profit or non-profit based, as funds always need to be raised and effectively managed. Green initiatives, The Gates Foundation, Idol Gives Back and many other programs, and many individuals, must increasingly help to show that life has to be about more than making money (although that is clearly important). Ideally life is also about helping others along the way, and trying to somehow make things better, bit by bit, leap by leap, and burst by burst. With each revolution and revelation, there is potential for the Internet, IT and humankind in general to further evolve.
Here are ten more of my (slightly more serious) "rules" for people thinking about starting a new online business, or adding a new product to an existing online business (these are written with B2B publishing in mind, but are generally applicable to any online business).
A lot of this sounds obvious (and is) but it's remarkable how many people don't do these things.
It's also remarkable how many startups seem to almost intentionally ignore the fundamentals when starting a business (see 9).
1. Talk to customers about your idea first, & before you do anything else
2. Choosing Web technology is easy; implementing it is hard
3. If you already owna Web business leverage its key assets – existing audience and customers – to launch brand extensions
4. Audit the here and now (your existing Web operation) before tackling the future. If it's broken you need to fix it before you can do anything else
5.Remember that content is fundamental to any Web site
6.Remember that revenue diversification is essential to running a successful Web business
7.You are running an Internet business; use it to create accountability at every level of your organization
8.Challenge current assumptions about online ("Web 2.0 is a good thing" "blogging makes money" etc.)
9. The purpose of ANY business is first and last to make money
10. Before launching a new product, ask yourself if it would succeed if it was not online. If the answer is "no," don't launch it
Happy to expand on any of these points to anyone that's interested – these are all things that I learned the hard way.
I can liken the "bubble burst' syndrom in the technology industry tothe numerous failures of civil engineering structures over the centuries. Those failures have certainly costs lives and collosal material lost but they have also help shapen the quality of service the profession is delivering now. Those failures were not desired in the first place but they inevitably form a part of how the profesion evolves with time.
As we look into the future of the internet, i think it will be good for us to consider bubble burst as part of the evolutionary process. They can be devastating finacially and economically but they also offers us remarkbly opportunities for advancement as this writer rightly pointed out:
So in the end, bubbles will always come. Can we prevent them from bursting, yes we could but should they burst in the process, then those who survive can build more advance systems from the ashes of despair and loss!!!
I found the following article of interest to the discussion. I basically call it the "Denial Syndrom" when people of no mean standing ignore signs of impending failure. According to the writer, the main reason for the first bubble burst is denial and it will be the undoing of the present scenario we are facing:
Top 10 Things I've Learned About Online Publishing in the Last 10 Years
10) The sole purpose of Web 2.0 B2B publishing is to get old, stuffed shirts to say things like "Twitter."
9) Linking back to other sites is considered the new "reporting."
8) Success means having better looking writers than your competitor sites.
7) If you build your foundation upon made-up, marketing buzzwords -- they will come.
6) Do not base your brand on a concept developed at a Stanford frat party (downonthefarm take note).
5) Choose a site URL that isn't easily confused with one for mail-order brides.
4) I should have majored in zoology.
3) Don't take advice from anyone who says, "It worked for me in the 90s."
2) Ignore anyone who claims to know the future of online publishing. Especially if they said the same thing in 1999. Or work for a VC. Or live in San Francisco.
1) Have a good time, ALL the time!
(Note: I have a more serious list that I'll dig up and post later)
Perhaps even more than The Data Communications Gigabit Ethernet Handbook, and The High-Speed LANs Handbook, it would be interesting to read a book by you that was about creating and developing Light Reading, and the journey that resulted in the sale to CMP and the creation of the Internet Evolution.
With respect and sincerity, you've had some very impressive results... inherent to the related storyline there are no doubt valuable things others could learn and benefit from. Thank you in advance for related sharing.
Recession can lead to re-invention. And to borrow somewhat from Hayes, it is more important than ever to share essential characteristics that may help enable leaps, for all.
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Neal Stephenson is best known as the author of science fiction novels such as SnowCrash and Anathem. But he does other things as well. Among them: He's assembled a team of scientists and engineers to figure out how to build a 20-kilometer-tall tower to use as a platform for launching rockets into space.
While interstellar travel presents huge challenges, it's "almost inevitable," according to a speaker at the Starship Century symposium here in San Diego.
Catch up on the week with one simple serving of Friday File. We've pieced together 10 interesting news bites you may have missed and put them together in bite-size morsels.
The US government is funding controversial projects to collect daily Internet activity, including Web searches, Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, and the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones. Its goal is to map these interactions to predict social behavior, such as protests.
Twitter has produced some great results for the world of bloggers: It's cleared the inter-sphere of those 600-word posts that always only contained 140 characters worth of content.
For users with large numbers of Twitter followers, the service has become irrelevant. Is this the beginning of the end for the short message service we have allegedly loved?
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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