Has Silicon Valley lost its edge?
Commentary: It looks like a pretty grim year's ahead
By John C. Dvorak
Last Update: 2:14 PM ET Apr 5, 2007
BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Has the Valley lots its edge? Apparently it has, if the annual event at the Churchill Club in San Jose, Calif., last week is any indication.
The event was designed to reveal the top 10 trends in technology. It revealed nothing.
This year, the gathering brought four of the greatest venture capitalists in the world on stage with the publisher cum blogger Tony Perkins. The insights, predictions and pronouncements were staggeringly dull, if not downright inane.
Aspects of this event were thoroughly covered by various blogs and publications here, here and here. The material was so boring that none of it got picked up by any major media outlet. That tells you something.
The activity pretty much begins and ends with John Doerr, who is often cited as the greatest venture capitalist who ever lived. To me, he is best known for jumping on the Internet-browser business early on with investments in Netscape.
This Silicon Valley event was so boring that none of it got picked up by any major media outlet. That tells you something.
He was also an early investor in Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW
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SUNW ) and actually toyed with the idea of running it years back. But Doerr has been behind a number of incredible turkeys such as the Dynabook -- a laptop powered by a lead-acid battery.
His prognostication abilities are also in question ever since he funded the Segway and promoted it to his friends. Most recently, Doerr seems to be involved in Democratic Party politics as a fund-raiser supporting various losers.
So when he tells an audience of about 800 that Apple Inc.'s (AAPL
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AAPL ) iPhone will be the most important product of the year, we have to wonder whether he's lost all interest in tech. I mean really.
To make matters worse, he makes the claim that the mobile phone "will displace the PC." This notion has been coming in and out of public discourse since at least 1997 and has always baffled me. Yeah, I'm going to get rid of my keyboard and PC so I can write these columns on a phone. Cripes.
I have no idea what motivates people to promote the phone over the computer and I cannot see the logic of it, but the idea seems to always come from people who just get tired of technology and want a simpler life. At least Doerr didn't predict that this would be the "year of the robot," which I find to be the stock prediction coming from most technologists who are about to leave the scene.
Therefore we can assume that Doerr is not done yet, and God knows the Valley needs his nervous energy and weedy charisma. Most of the genuine personalities in the place have been replaced by accountants and other dullards.
Other prognosticators at the event included the affable Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who predicted hybrid life forms in the future thanks to gene splicing. Definitely a creepy thought. I imagine a cow's head on a pig.
Web 2.0 is a catchall term invented to make things seem more exciting then they actually are.
He also went out on a limb and predicted better and faster computer memory. People paid actual money to hear this.
Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, from what I could tell, couldn't in fact make a prediction. Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners said that the big trend was going to be video. This was kind of like predicting that in the years ahead there would be more freeways.
None of the few bloggers covering this event could identify the 10 trends that were actually enumerated. I watched some videos of the event and could find no evidence of anything other than aimless and vague rambling. And this group is the cream of the crop. It might as well have been four old codgers bickering on a porch in Jackson, Mississippi.
It's now obvious that the tech scene in Silicon Valley is a rudderless ship. Everyone claims to be throwing tons of money at Web 2.0 initiatives, but we cannot fathom what this even means, since Web 2.0 is a catchall term invented by a writer to make things seem more exciting then they actually are.
Looks like a pretty grim year ahead for the Valley. End of Story
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[Harry: This article pretty much summaries my feeling over the last 3 years. There have been no clear trends that are revolutionary, just a lot of incremental improvements on existing trends/tehcnologies. While you can more money at that, getting the kind of returns venture capitalist (10 times or more) are used to are tough.] |
