Silicon valley = detroit (2/2)

 One last article I read while fighting with the lowly economy class seats of a Finnair cattle transporter plane earlier this week: an interview of Internet pioneer Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal.

Wired: We’ve had tremendous growth in the Internet, which is how you made your fortune. Why not look there?

Thiel: Obviously we’ve done well online. But how much more progress is there going to be? How many big new Internet companies are there? In the ’90s we had Netscape, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon. In the past eight years there have been only two: Google and Facebook.

Wired: Twitter?

Thiel: Possibly. Still, the numbers suggest a maturing industry. The Internet may be culturally important, just as the automobile was culturally more important in the ’50s than the ’20s, as we got suburbia and built the Interstate Highway System. But the last successful car company started in the US was Jeep in 1941.

Link

I wrote a post comparing the Silicon Valley to Detroit a little while ago. This makes me think that this old intuition is getting closer to turning into a fact.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 10:40 am and is filed under business, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Silicon valley = detroit (2/2)”

  1. clay ball Says:
    April 10th, 2010 at 1:10 am

    I believe that we live within the parameters set by the Earth & its resources…the biggest & best challenge for the future of technology is to develop technologies that help people to better live within those parameters (instead of pretending we don’t need to listen to the very source of our life!)…the basics like water, sustainable energy, food, restoring the parts of the Earth that are degraded, are really where the security of our future lies (in my tiny opinion)…

    Now, if these genius types could invent the first biodegradable laptop, a compostable i-phone…that would be a really HUGE breakthrough for the 2010’s! :)

  2. Jerry Jaz Says:
    April 15th, 2010 at 8:14 pm

    And remember, it is all running on Internet time. The great accelerator. What is five years or ten years of the Internet when translated into earth time?

    The Interstate Highway System was predicated on an endless supply of something and originally designed to move military bulk. Perhaps the analogy of Detroit/Silicon Valley is more of an allusion to intellect than actual real estate in terms of stagnancy and decline.

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