While the technorati of Europe were busy mingling at LeWeb 2010, students were breaking windows and throwing eggs at cars in London. I was so busy talking to people about Sentimnt, that I didn’t really have time to follow the news of student protests back home.
Now however, coming back home and having been through the experience of LeWeb, I can see a link between the two, somehow.
For the past 10 years, many have been complaining about the declining quality of British graduates and the shrinking number of the ones taking science and engineering courses. Many have complained about the increase in the number of students seeking degrees in “Media Studies” and course like that.
Proponents of the rise in the student fees, state that making students pay for part of their studies will make them think twice about taking Media Studies and will opt for a degree that will have a higher probability of paying off their debt when they graduate. This is a hypothesis that only time can prove. I tend to agree for now.
Back on the tech scene, there has been a lot of talk about how the cost of starting a technology/IT business has been falling constantly. Now that storage, processing power and even data is turning into commodities, young entrepreneurs have a very low barrier of entry when starting their new businesses. I also can’t disagree with this.
Computer industry has always been somewhat cultish. It’s the case for most new industries. The pioneers of the car industry had followers the same way Steve Jobs now has followers. Looking back at my “heros” when I was starting to learn programming on my Commodore 64, I can remember how Bill Gates, Mitch Kapor, Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak had God like status in my mind. I grew up believing in the importance of brilliant ideas and more importantly, great engineering.
That’s why last weeks LeWeb was disappointing for me. Not because I didn’t get to meet whom I wanted to meet or didn’t get what wanted to get. But because I realised how the heros of the IT industry have changed. Heros of the new social age of computing are mostly people who build their businesses by picking pieces of technology from the vast shelf of open source library and put them together. They proudly call themselves Hackers, a name that 5 years ago meant someone who codes with a very short sight and no care (or knowledge) about maintaining a system for the long run.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of great companies with exceptional engineering behind them, also the big players in the new era of social computing have built impressive technologies to deal with the “Web scale”. Cassandra and Hadoop are two examples. But there is no way anyone can convince me that you can compare the engineering talent and discipline of companies like Intel, HP, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, Google or Apple with the new social heros on the block like Groupon, FourSquare or even Twitter and Facebook.
Where are the rioting students in all this? Well, here is my worry. I am worried that the combination of low barrier of entry and startup cost and the replacement of old tech-heavy heros with MBA like managers who can grow a social network to 500 million people is shifting our talents to businesses with less added value.
In the middle of all this, the over enthusiastic media outlets also fan the flames by focusing almost primarily on business similar to Groupon where technology is almost negligible and the whole aim is making as much money as possible. And who benefits the most from all this? Investors who love 10X exits in shorter and shorter times. No wonder outfits like Y-Combinator love to promote the “Hack” culture. After all, who cares about the long run if you can put some open source code together, give it a social twist and shift it for 10 times more than what you put in it? Knowledge? Engineering? You’re waisting your time!