zeigor

Disrupting market is not easy, but it significantly easier, if the first priority of the company is not being self sustainable and instead rely on on venture capital. Twitter is an interesting example in that context. A company that surfaced a unique user behavior and created utterly new communication patterns. Yet, because it didn't focus building a business, it ended having to rely on archaic business models to finance itself while in the process disregarding the people who helped make it grow.

Until recently, technology made low-paying, undesired jobs obsolete at a pace that made it possible for more jobs to be created by new industries than the industries that have been disrupted by them.

We are now entering a period in which middle and high paying jobs being replaced by machines. High-frequency trading replaced a whole profession in the financial sectors. There are now machines that are capable to analyze an x-ray image and determine the cause of the problem, leaving the doctor with "just" the job of delivering the news.

So, yes, we do have a problem. I'm not a Neo Luddite. The purpose of this is not to destroy the Internet and all the machines, but I do think that we need to have an ongoing debate about the social structures that we are dissolving as much as about those that we want to build up.

You are right, I don't believe in the rhetoric of trickle-down economics, because it is just that: rhetoric. The US is a good case in point for that.

My advice was "learn from them", not "copy them". There are certain aspects of Mittelstand companies that make them more appealing to what I'd describe as important qualities in a company. Long-term thinking, being involved in their communities, etc.

It was a counter argument to a massively Silicon Valley focused industry. A plea to extend the horizon of what constitutes a best practice.

Here is a re-post of the blog post: http://thirdwaveberlin.tumblr.com/post/64289810298/week-note...

Sorry, I wasn't prepared for ending up on hacker news. Thanks for the feedback so far, will try to answer to some of the comments soon.