It’s hard to look at your list and be impressed with Silicon Valley since around 2010.
The 2010s seem to be a decade where existing giants scaled, without any fundamentally new technological developments.
The 2010s seem to be a decade where existing giants scaled, without any fundamentally new technological developments.
I wouldn't go that far. The cloud became a thing in 2010 and from that big data appeared allowing data science to appear.
The 2010s is the era of data science and ML, which is a larger leap than many give credit for. The 2010s are just like the '80s in that new technology appeared, but end consumers didn't see much of a difference until the late '90s. Just yesterday CA gave a license to GM to legally allow fully self driving cars.
Am I, like, way off?
There are dozens of companies not named Uber or Airbnb that have come out of SV in the past 10-15 years that lead the world at what they do. You won't see the SV bashers talk about any of that, they go out of their way to avoid that point in fact.
Where is the Cloudflare of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the ServiceNow of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the WorkDay of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the Palo Alto Networks of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the Twilio of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the Snowflake of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the Splunk of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the Okta of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the Veeva Systems of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the Zoom of Europe? Doesn't exist.
Where is the DataDog of Europe? Doesn't exist. (DataDog is NY, however they have an office in the SV area as well)
And on the list goes. These are massive, wild success stories. Most of them are already big companies and they're growing fast. With few exceptions meanwhile most of the rest of the world not named China is asleep, and SV keeps on conquering markets and building giant software companies.
Where is the global competition for these companies? It largely doesn't exist, they're going to keep on with the SV traditional of pushing out of the homogeneous US market and scaling up globally and building giant companies.
By the way, of all the companies you listed, only Zoom and Snowflake were actually founded after 2010. And that's the point. In the past 10 years, we haven't seen any Googles, Apples, or Microsofts emerge, despite eye-popping levels of venture investment -- which is a bit disappointing.
Altough, for example, the work Google did in the 2010's in machine learning does seem fundamental.
One aspect of the scale these companies are achieving is the political implications. Yes, the worry in DC over their manipulation of human nature, but it's also issues like the headbutting of the gig-labor lifestyle against tax policy right in California. Pushing technology forward eventually encounters politics and it's interesting to watch these firms gird up for that battle.
These new - "outsiders" usually spend huge sums on leveraging what is essentially just technology used for union busting and abstracting away wage slavery.
Its a capitalists idea of innovation, and it small dreams. You don't need to invent a alexa (the device), if you can drive down the wage of a person to near zero and own a alexa (the person).
They already had that back in ancient rome- and thus never developed the Greek steam engine.
To become really innovative at scale again, the valley needs to exorcise those tech external investors.
1975: National Semi, our new audio amp allows people to buy cheap high quality stereo's.
2010: Ubber, our app that ratfucks the taxi industry.
Source: my numerous experiences with taxis in multiple cities in the US and around the world before and after Uber
I guess now they deliver lunch so that's pretty cool.
I for one look forward to the movie.
Not to mention Uber and Lift don't pay for the roads their businesses depend on. And then Uber and Lift have dramatically increased congestion in a lot of cities. Which negatively impacts people that live in those cities. Finally both Uber and Lift are applying political pressure to eliminate mass transit.
Example 1: innovations in technology & clever business model put previously expensive thing in reach for an order of magnitude wider audience, leads to significant qualitative shift in behavior/capabilities for the average person.
Uber: Exactly the same thing.
Why are you so offended about the harm to the taxi industry, what about all the vacuum tube manufacturers put out of business by semiconductors? Innovation has always involved creative destruction, but for some reason there's a bigger than usual portion of society now that is completely unwilling to acknowledge utilitarian benefits and wants to make all change illegal. And the even greater tragedy is it's always the comfortable, well-off upper middle class making these arguments on behalf of the working class, with absolutely no skin in the game because they will never be the first ones affected by the negative consequences of their absolutist worldview.
Lightbulbs and would have been a better pivot (with or without a gas in the medium for neon lights or CFBs) at least until LEDs finished them off.
The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.
Also, the argument on Uber/Lyft drivers not being contractors since they can't set their own rates and decide which ride they take strikes me as weird since medallion drivers were contractors, had to charge the price set by the city and could only pick-up customers in the (arbitrary) zones covered by their medallions.
And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).
Maybe there was some place in the world where taxis were clean and taxi drivers honest, but in my corner of the world they were synonymous with low-key mafia.
Therefore they mostly preyed on international tourists at the airport.