IMO, what's hampering Silicon Valley innovation right now is the outrageous cost of living. It's hard to take a leap when you have a million dollar mortgage. Startups still happen of course but only with significant capital backing. But I'd wager the pace has slowed significantly.
I wish a “remote hub” concept would become popular. Where you work remote but need to be close enough to come in once a week or for big meetings. This would allow people to move a little further away and would possibly allow areas right outside the bay to become an extension of Silicon Valley.
If you only come to the office once a week and otherwise live outside of the valley, that gets a lot harder to do.
I live in the south bay and already feel the pinch, as most of the meetups I'd want to go to are in San Francisco, about an hour's drive away. When I worked in SF, it was no big deal to stick around for a meetup or a drink. Now it's 1/2 a day's outing.
I ignore 99% of such events, and keep communication almost exclusively online. Am I missing much? (I'm an engineer, though, not an entrepreneur.)
I meet founders, some of whom will eventually be household names and others not. I've kept up email correspondence with a few of my fellow user group managers and I try to take them out to lunch when I return.
Probably will be in SF in April if any HN'ers want to hit me up, especially those interested in the No Code space.
In particular here though I was just talking about better commuter trains and (the existence of) HSR, neither of which is really dependent on density.
NYC subway is only efficient because Manhattan is so dense, and much of areas around it are reasonably dense.
Commuting from further away, like a couple dozen miles into NY or NJ, becomes massively more burdensome, because a train has to go all this distance, and the station is not close to home. Of course, you can spend this hour or two reading, or maybe writing or even sleeping on the train, unlike driving.
Think about this, a house that costs i. The low two digits to build is being sold for $400,000 in sunnyvale because of the crunch and the wages that bigCo SC firms put on the situation...
There is an enormous opportunity here.
That's nice to sell a book, but I see no need to read that pablum. A large established company vs a startup (<50 employees) is night and day.
Having worked for decades in the "industry", which is a conglomeration of all industry, an Amazon team pushes a production button style change and it goes on the quarterly release notes with fanfare, while small companies are iterating daily. JPMorgan, Experian, Cambia...you hear VPs talking about meetings with congress critters, but it's largely to pull blood from stone, not to make a better product. That would be incidental, if ever, as long as the metrics they are fed show an incline.
Maybe it would expose you to information that's outside your own personal experience?
AT&T was quite a big company in its prime, a monopoly in fact, but extremely innovative. Same goes for Xerox. I suspect Google's longer-reaching research efforts (quantum computing, machine learning) could pay off similar dividends eventually, if they aren't regulated out of existence.
Yes, big companies are often hampered by bureaucracy. Many are not innovative. And in all cases, the majority of employees need to focus on the bread-and-butter work that keeps the lights on. But big companies also have the resources needed to invest in long-term R&D with potentially big payoff down the road.
Conversely, you could make the case that most SV start-ups are actually not that innovative, and that SV as a whole gets perversely fixated on the past: every occasional success, whether it's social media or mobile apps or the gig economy, spawns a thousand imitators hoping to cash in on past success. Do we really need to be funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to create more "Like X but for Y" smartphone apps?
I've seen this stuff for DECADES. Another book is not on the menu. NOTHING has changed and pretending there's new insight is pointless.
> big companies also have the resources needed to invest in long-term R&D with potentially big payoff down the road.
Very few do this (AMZ is one, MSFT another). The exceptions do not make a rule, nor do they "innovate" (iterative improvement) as much as "experiment" to break into new markets. This is an important observation, which is a good indicator of the level of analysis performed.
It's important to note, innovation itself rarely lends to a successful company, which is a different discussion and necessarily colors the state of things.
The book is 35 years old, and Drucker himself was 76 years old when it was published. He was considered a well-respected guy in the field, to understate it somewhat, and he had also seen this stuff for decades.
Many management books are not worth the time it takes to read them. But in my opinion, Drucker is always worth the investment even if he turns out to be wrong about a particular topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Entrepreneurship-Peter-F-D...
Drucker was a critic of the idea that small firms are more innovative than large firms. He provides a wealth of innovation about the styles of innovation that large firms produce.
About this:
"But there’s a more troubling possibility. Maybe something has changed about the nature of innovation, at least in software."
When was this era? From the 1940s to the early 1980s, software development was mostly done at big firms such as IBM and Hewlett Packard. The rise of the personal computer allowed a wave of software firms, such as Microsoft and Adobe, to get going, but even then, the costs of getting such a startup going was much higher than now. The era of the really cheap software startup was basically the era of the CRUD app moved to the Web, basically 1995 to 2015, give or take a few years on either side. My point is, that era is more the exception than the rule, given the history of the industry.
It seems melodramatic to claim that a specific culture was lost, though it is absolutely true that the industry has matured and therefore the situation has changed. We are unlikely to see any more startups come out of Silicon Valley and become huge like Microsoft or Adobe or Google or Facebook.