This post is a bit recursively recursive as I cite Dave Winer's thoughts on the reasons software development ought to be a more important focus than it is. In the article, he cites a piece I wrote yesterday which focuses on Radio, which is software Dave makes.... I still thought it interesting enough to share with you!
It's the software, dummy!.
Markoff: "At this year's Agenda conference, traditionally an upbeat gathering of the computer and Internet industries' elite, attendance was low and the mood even lower. Executives engaged in a hunt for the bottom of the decline with few seeing even a hint of new growth on the horizon."
Here's my pledge to growth in the Valley. I'm refinancing my house and taking out a bit of extra money, and I'm going to use $2,000 of that to buy a new multi-gigahertz laptop to run some software that Bill Gates has never even heard of. It's mission-critical for me, and it would love more gigahertz.
In Andy Grove's Valley of Death they only buy software from Bill, and he ran out of new ideas when he drove Lotus out of business. Or was it Novell? What our industry needs more than anything is software to soak up those cycles productively and not just for games. But there have to be features that drive adoption. Markoff's story concludes that it may have been the music industry that sparked the doldroms in computers. That, and Microsoft's software monopoly. Moore's Law continues to rage on, but there's no software to soak up the cycles. Or is there?
Kevin Werbach and Dan Shafer said it so well yesterday. It's so recursive. It's staring you in the face. Get a weblog and do your readers a favor, let them know where the next round of growth is going to come from. Andy Grove, it must be great to have so many accomplishments. Encourage the young people at Intel to get out more and stop looking to Microsoft for all the new software. Fund the resurrection of software in the Valley. You need us to sell more hertz, and that's what you sell. Right? Let's pop the stack back to the 70's when we did technology in Silicon Valley. Software, software, software, that should be our mantra.
[Scripting News]
