“When Obama became President, there was a lot of excitement about Government. Respected academics, like my former Dean at Duke, Kristina Johnson, left their jobs to help change the world. Nearly all of these people became disenchanted. Government jobs are considered drab and bureaucratic again—like they used to be.”
Vivek Wadhwa on the resignation of Vivek Kundra, the Federal Government’s first Chief Information Officer (CIO)
In the tech world, patents don’t foster innovation; they inhibit it. They are like nuclear weapons in an arms race, in that companies use them to hold competitors back or to extort license fees from companies that can’t afford the time and cost of litigation.
These battles play out every week in Silicon Valley: among the behemoths—Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP—and between behemoths, startups, patent trolls, and large corporations. Startup entrepreneurs live in constant fear that behemoths or patent trolls will bankrupt them with frivolous lawsuits.
A genome test—which would have cost over a billion dollars two decades ago—will soon cost less than $100. Advances in genome testing, it is postulated, may make it possible to create personalized drug formulations.
The young company founder—who previously had been unable to make ends meet—was seen driving around in a fancy red Corvette. When confronted, he retorted that he hadn’t started his business to live the life of a hermit; he needed to keep his girlfriend happy and enjoy life.
Tech Crunch founder Mike Arrington said that he didn’t learn much from college; gaining admittance to a Berkeley or Harvard is the only certification a student needs; dropping out from college doesn’t carry a stigma anymore; so “the best thing in the world is to go to Harvard for a year and drop out because everyone knows you were smart enough to get in”.
“The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are.”
When the iPad was first announced I predicted that it would be a game changer. I really believed that this cool new device would solve the world’s technology problems and reduce the number of electronic gadgets I had to carry around.
It just doesn’t do its magic for me any longer. Here’s why…
Introducing a new blog by Vivek Wadhwa on technology, immigration and more…
Meet the new Indian techies. Meena believes that if she works hard enough, she can build her own “big business”—maybe a Google. Girls with the ambition and confidence to enter the tech world are rare even in Silicon Valley but Meena lives in a slum in New Delhi.
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McMansions, hefty bank balances, unfettered success, Ivy League schools, a world embroidered with dollar signs.
For many Indian immigrants, that was the fabric of the American Dream. Add to that a Lexus and maybe a BMW in the double car garage, lots of travel, lots of dining out, and the ability to live a rich lifestyle.
For other Indian immigrants, the American Dream was much more modest—just the ability to survive, to consolidate some savings and send funds back home to family members still in the village.
Yet all these dreams, big and small, modest and immodest, have been gathered, whipped up and churned in the ruthless and noisy cement mixer of the economy—pummeled, pushed and battered by the worst crisis in memory as the global economy has taken a severe beating.