Peter Thiel: "I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough"

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/21/peter-thiel-new-yorker-grump/

by llambda • 15 years ago

116 166 15 years ago

Nope. It's more of a "deployment of technology" breakthrough. Most of the individual technologies there have been around for a while.

snpnx• 15 years ago

That, and a very well designed user-interface are what make the iPhone exceptional. That's why many 'geeks' don't feel it's worth the praise, there are better phones out there in terms of technology, but hardly in terms of usability.

ryandvm• 15 years ago

Thiel is right. In 100 years, people are still going to be talking about inventors like Ford and Edison. I doubt you'll find 22nd century schoolchildren reading about the little company that made shiny, walled-garden media players.

tptacek2• 15 years ago

Ford and Edison. You see the irony there, right?

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

Wikipedia on "incandescent light bulb"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb):

In addressing the question of who invented the incandescent lamp, historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison.

On "phonograph" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph):

Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to produce a device that could both record and reproduce sound... [Charles] Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the Phonograph in 1877.

I won't bother to quote the enormous list of Henry Ford's predecessors that appears in e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile. I'd never do them justice.

ralphsaunders• 15 years ago

Do they teach about what Ford did today?

comatose_kid• 15 years ago

Introducing your biases does not strengthen your argument.

No one really knows what people will be talking about in 100 years. That said, the iPhone seems to be as good a candidate as your examples. The interface was revolutionary compared to the devices which came before it, and the idea that 3rd parties could distribute apps without going thru the carriers was also a big change.

Saavedro• 15 years ago

"the little company that made shiny, walled-garden media players"

Yup. That's all Apple ever did all right.

TomOfTTB• 15 years ago

I don't think that's true. I think the innovation of the iPhone was in two areas...

1. It was the first product to popularize touch. That's going to have a big impact in the future of technology. The gestures pioneered by the iPhone (swipe, pinch to zoom) could very well exist 100 years from now and if they do the iPhone will be their ancestor. That's a big deal.

2. The iPhone saved Apple and Apple changed the conversation in technology. 10 years ago adding more features and giving users 20 different ways to do things was considered an asset. Now the technology industry has changed direction back towards designing a product and giving the user 1 way to do things that's easier. I'm inclined to believe we'll eventually reach a happy medium between those two philosophies but there's no doubt the design side was losing out before Apple's resurgence.

jinushaun• 15 years ago

I think Thiel is frustrated that innovation in this country has shifted from science and technology to mobile phones and banner ads. The best and brightest are working in the wrong industry. Instead of researching alternative energy, space travel, health, etc, we're researching thinner smartphones with better battery life and more effective ways to sell ads.

Makes me wonder how far along we'd be, technologically, if YouTube and Facebook had never been invented... We're just too distracted now. Maybe Fermi's Paradox can be explained by alien civilisations becoming too busy posting cat videos on Twitter to invent inter-stellar travel.

marknutter4• 15 years ago

You really think that people aren't researching health, alternative energy, and space travel?

farsmith• 15 years ago

Ads aren't an end to themselves. Back in the day they made possible free TV and well funded newspapers. Now they make it possible for even better informational services to be free

cryptoz• 15 years ago

The entire reason that SpaceX exists, along with Tesla Motors, is that Elon Musk worked hard to figure out new ways for people to send money over the internet. He made lots of money himself, and now he creates electric cars and builds spaceships. I wouldn't worry too much.

Edit: confused eBay and Paypal. Musk founded Paypal.

laglad• 15 years ago

Thanks for this point.

The reason that so many intelligent and driven entrepreneurs are innovating on "less difficult" technologies is precisely because this low-hanging fruit offers a very high impact leverage right now. More people take the plunge because it costs less to start a company. Consequently, more people are working on more niche problems. This is a good thing.

I'd be more concerned with improving the technical abilities of the people entering the entrepreneurial pipeline than about where they are applying themselves. Getting more technical immigrants into the USA would be a decent first step.

statictype• 15 years ago

Why do you think the best and brightest are all in the software/tech industry? I'm not convinced that this is true.

jonhendry• 15 years ago

"I think Thiel is frustrated that innovation in this country has shifted from science and technology to mobile phones and banner ads. "

Mobile phones and banner ads? Try collateralized debt obligations, CDO-squared, and other financial chicanery.

farlington• 15 years ago

I think that's an overly reductive assessment to say 'mobile phones and banner ads.' Mobile computers are extremely sophisticated communication tools and platforms—stuff that used to be science fiction—the social, cultural, scientific benefits of which are immeasurable.

ahoyhere• 15 years ago

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

chc2• 15 years ago

This is a pretty well worn quote, but it really is a good thing to keep in mind anytime you hear people talking about how [whatever] is declining. If things were getting worse even 1% as often as people say they are, we would be extinct by now.

brandall10• 15 years ago

In a sense I agree with you, but things are perhaps not quite so black and white.

YouTube (as a platform) may have given us Justin Bieber, but it also gave us the Khan Academy. And the latter has surely inspired this recent surge from the Stanford faculty.

Perhaps education needs disruption as a prerequisite for some of these bigger problems to be tackled.

nazgulnarsil• 15 years ago

the problems you listed aren't pressing at all. alternative energy? we have truly ridiculous thorium reactor designs that could supply power (and run desalination off the back end for free) for the next thousand years. Space travel? Canned primates is a blind alley and we're ignoring more efficient designs because people are afraid of the word nuclear. Health? We actively prevent the falling in cost that would make health care more widely affordable, and that's granting that health care is related to health outcomes, which isn't at all clear.

No one wants to hear that all of our problems are self imposed. It's too terrifying given the current state of affairs.

pjscott2• 15 years ago

I find it reassuring to know that, for many of our most dire problems, there are solutions out there. The fact that we're not using them doesn't mean we won't if we get desperate enough.

marknutter4• 15 years ago

Think of all the app developers out there who are making a living off the iPhone. Think of all the web developers out there whose audience has now increased dramatically because of Facebook and iPhone getting more people to use the web. What Thiel is having a hard time with is the move to an information-centric economy. Outside of better renewable energy, we pretty much have all the bases covered for basic, comfortable human existence. It's all about the creation and dissemination of information, now.

zerostar073• 15 years ago

Compare that to the previous century. Where is the equivalent of the airplane, radio transmission, space travel, television, antibiotics, the Internet? Those were breakthroughs, not just incremental advances. There s never 'enough progress'. One should be an optimist though, there s innovation incubated in the life sciences

inerte• 15 years ago

Although I mostly side with Tiel on his observations, to be fair you're comparing a century to a decade. And in hindsight it is easy to tell what was a breakthrough. Remember that when computers were invented few thought that we would have them in the palms of our hands.

jleyank4• 15 years ago

Hmm... I might be off by a year or two, but I think it's pretty #%!*^&% amazing that you can have a powerful computer that is a link to the world in your pocket. That was the deepest science fiction 20-30 years ago. Maybe it's due to cheap flash memory, or maybe flash memory itself. No matter, it's pretty amazing.

Yeah, it would be quite nice to have alternative energy sources that were inexpensive. It would also nice to have cures for all "popular" diseases. But, compared to mucking with computers, those things cost serious money and require serious hardware. Oh, and can't be solved by "release early and release often".

marshallp• 15 years ago

Except for the little matter of dying from a heart attack or cancer. Or an asteroid impact. Or that I can't afford a my own 747, or spaceship. Peter Thiel is lamenting that we have set our sights so low.

marknutter4• 15 years ago

Asteroid impacts and space travel? This is what keeps you up at night?

icebraining• 15 years ago

What about the first full face transplant ever? (http://health.yahoo.net/news/s/nm/us_usa_transplant_face)

blhack• 15 years ago

>Think of all the web developers out there whose audience has now increased dramatically because of Facebook and iPhone getting more people to use the web.

Do you have any data that backs this up? This seems dramatically counter-intuitive. I don't imagine a lot of people who would otherwise not be using the internet buying iPhones.

Facebook, perhaps, but not the iPhone.

marknutter4• 15 years ago

Oh please, just look around you - people have their faces buried in their phones everywhere you go, and it spans all demographics. Go to any airport and count the number of people using iPads. I don't need to provide data to back this up, although I'm confident I could; it's all around us.

chollida15• 15 years ago

well for facebook..... Think about how they benefit small businesses.

Now pretty much every small business I know has a facebook page. Most of the one's I'm thinking of didn't have a webpage. Now they can reach their audience with give aways and draws.

More thank half of my wife's wall is company page postings. Before facebook, we'd never heard form these companies after we bought something from them because they lacked the technical sophistication or didn't think it was worth their time. Facebook small business pages have been a real boon to small businesses from my perspective.

As for cell phones, it's true that I don't visit new sites due to having a cell phone, but I do visit sites much more often now that I've got a cell phone with internet.

Now if I"ve got 10 free minutes I can check my espn fantasy hockey stats or read hacker news.

backprojection• 15 years ago

Technologically speaking, sure. I don't think we know how to build a society which provides those benefits of a basic, comfortable existence for everyone, yet.

dman2• 15 years ago

Thiel would have run out of karma if he had made the same observation on HN.

igorgue3• 15 years ago

Good thing HN has a max of 11 downvotes (I know first hand), but I get your point, fanboyism here is strong.

leak• 15 years ago

I never knew that! This opens up so many more opportunities to comment! Thanks!

dman2• 15 years ago

Are you sure? I appeared to lose a lot more than 11 per post on this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3248916.

nirvana16• 15 years ago

The irony, of course, is that the person in this thread whose defending the iPhone is best on all sides by ignorant fanboys engaging in down votes... they've even managed to bury unrelated threads that I commented on, simply because I commented on them!

Hacker News is a rabidly anti-iPhone, anti-Apple, and anti-innovation, and anti-technology site. Or at least its overrun with ideologues with those characterisitcs.

negrera• 15 years ago

Comments like this from Peter provoke people to respond. Plain and simple. Rather than criticizing why he "thinks" the iPhone hasn't broken any boundaries, maybe he should "go-out" and stimulate more than "just 500 employees" at once (aka his reference to Twitter).

mikeryan• 15 years ago

“Apple is an innovative company, but I think it’s mostly a design innovator.”

Which is really the crux of what Apple is (I came here to say it and saw Thiel beat me to it). Apple has always been a product innovator more then a technology innovator.

The iPhone was still, very much, a breakthrough device. So was the iPod but neither were "technological breakthroughs"

r00fus• 15 years ago

The iPhone may not a technological breakthrough in that it changes the life of billions of people, no. In that vein, neither is Paypal, to be honest.

The part that annoys me is that Thiel drops this linkbait-worthy note, then doesn't qualify it by saying what would be a technological breakthrough (I did read the new yorker summary, too). Lot of hot air here.

igorgue3• 15 years ago

Well Peter, you're part of the problem. The more you invest in e.g.: social networks the more entrepreneurs are going to follow that instead of, you know, what you call "innovation".

notahacker• 15 years ago

This. The best recent examples of (i) companies capturing multibillion dollar markets through timing and effective implementation of existing concepts and (ii)profit bandwagon-jumping companies with no redeeming features whatsoever I can think of are both in Thiel's portfolio. you probably know which companies I'm respectively referring to. The return that he's going to generate from Facebook and Zynga may be reinvested in exciting technologies, but in the mean time his successes offer several billion reasons for others to copy his smart bets on companies whose innovations probably won't be lauded in future centuries

tptacek2• 15 years ago

How many iconic, break-out products are ever "technological breakthroughs"? Behind virtually every iconic product is a string of lesser known antecedents with the same fundamentals but imperfect packaging, pricing, or timing.

Counterexamples? Would love to hear them.

Otherwise, this is an extremely banal observation on Thiel's part.

schandur• 15 years ago

Reminds me of one of the themes in the book "Blue Ocean Strategy": the importance of value innovation, where the stress is on both low cost and differentiation.

adrianwaj• 15 years ago

What I think you mean to say is that breakthroughs should be about discoveries leading to an expansion of mind, that has yet to be known by any individual.

It's about breaking through the known, and can occur in any field of endeavour and will lead to new information: with that information a product should be created - Steve was, and Peter is looking for those products. They are in the position to do so, but neither will have that initial expansion of mind.

Seems like extracting the financial wealth of a breakthrough is why investors seek them.

wallflower2• 15 years ago

> Counterexamples? Would love to hear them.

One example.

PCR helped catalyze the multi-billion dollar molecular biology industry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction

nirvana16• 15 years ago

The Mac. Nobody is disputing that every product relies on previous products.

But the Mac is a good example of a technological break thru that had imperfect packaging, pricing AND timing.

The packaging was too restrictive for the time. Jobs' vision was right, but the industry hadn't developed far enough that you could ship a machine without internal slots and be successful.

The pricing was out of line with the rest of the market, and the rest of the market didn't recognize sufficient increase in value due to the GUI to make the pricing make sense.

And of course, both of those issues were issues of timing. The Mac took several years to be successful, and depending on how you measure things, some would say it has never become successful (still only being %23 of the market or something like that.)

But the Mac was a technology break thru. In fact, it contained many such breakthrus, both in hardware and software.

tedunangst3• 15 years ago

The Lisa would be a much better example than the Macintosh, considering the Mac came later but was still only like a Lisa 0.5.

j_baker• 15 years ago

Google. The search engine's algorithm really was a technological breakthrough in comparison to its antecedents which were better priced, packaged, timed, and marketed.

xiaoma2• 15 years ago

>Counterexamples? Would love to hear them.

Penicillin

tedunangst3• 15 years ago

Along those lines, the smallpox vaccine and X-rays.

incremental• 15 years ago

Not really a product, though, so that doesn't count as a good example. Obviously a major discovery with high impact, though.

tedunangst3• 15 years ago

Light bulb and vulcanization of rubber. I don't think the lesser known antecedents had the same fundamentals.

zerostar073• 15 years ago

So, if you d take a stab, in what sectors do you expect to see the real breakthroughs? My bet is on genetic medicine and the brain sciences.

jleyank4• 15 years ago

Genetic engineering is going to be a tough sell with the masses. They won't touch GM corn, tomatoes, ... How the hell are they going to accept GM-mods to themselves?

zerostar073• 15 years ago

A common characteristic of breakthroughs is that they are at first frightening

Tichy• 15 years ago

If they have to choose between a genetic engineering product and dying?

nostromo• 15 years ago

People are following the money and innovating in places where it's possible to build a business with limited capital in a short time. In other words, the consumer internet -- which is exactly where Thiel has made his money, and made investments.

Unlike the average entrepreneur however, Thiel has the ability to change that, by funding more startups like SpaceX and RoboteX, and fewer like Zynga and Spotify.

SODaniel• 15 years ago

Pretty obvious though necessary statement it seems. None of the 'i' products have ever been about technology and Steve Jobs was never a innovator. It's all about design and consumer behavior, starting with iTunes and ending with iTunes.

wavephorm2• 15 years ago

Smartphones affordable enough for the third world, and pervasive wireless internet access will almost definitely have a larger impact on the world than space travel ever will.

tree_of_item• 15 years ago

Ever? That's an incredibly strong statement. Ever is a very long time. Do you think smartphones will be more important than space travel in 300 years? What will the word "smartphone" mean then?

wavephorm2• 15 years ago

I should've added 'for the foreseeable future'. Although it gives us "feel good" vibes, having a small number of people in space does not significantly improve the lives of many people.

iqster2• 15 years ago

I'm part of the academic research community that focuses on mobile. My personal opinion is that both the iPhone and the iPad pushed the barrier of what was thought to be possible.

In the case of the iPhone, it redefined browsing on small form factor devices. Yes ... pinch to zoom was published before. But the specific implementation into the web browser was pretty unique. The state of the art device prior to the iPhone was the Nokia 770 tablet. Compare that to an iPhone.

W.r.t the iPad, when Jobs claimed it would last 8 hours (I think he said you could play movies the entire way on a long distance flight), I didn't believe it. Nor could other researchers I talked to. Apple's custom silicon for media playback didn't factor into people's imagination.

pjscott2• 15 years ago

All those things are cool, but compare with airplanes, which made the world drastically smaller. Or with the Haber-Bosch process, which prevents us from starving. That's the kind of big breakthrough technology that Thiel is talking about. The iPhone, while really neat, doesn't quite measure up.

iqster2• 15 years ago

One of my history professors in college said something I found quite remarkable. Let me share it ... he said in the history of humanity, there have been very few revolutions. When humans figured out how to talk was one. You can suddenly communicate with others! The other big revolution was when people learned to write. Now, you ideas can span space or time. The advent of computers, telecommunications and the Internet was another such revolution. You can now instantly connect with anyone around the planet! While the iPhone can't take the credit for all this, perhaps you see why I disagree with Thiel :)

nirvana16• 15 years ago

The iPhone contains a key invention, and several innovations. This is the simple fact of reality.

The reason these stories are constantly appearing on HN, nearly 4 years since the iPhone was introduced, is because those who want to diminish the invention of multi-touch, like everyone else, sat awed at the iPhone when it was first introduced. That was a very magical moment, and if the iPhone hadn't been a radical departure, then it would have been just another cell phone introduction. It's not often you get to see a new technology that seems magical for the first time.

Theil is talking in terms of making a dent in society. Obviously his standards for a "dent in the universe" are different than Steve Jobs. That's fine for him, but don't confuse it for support for your ideology.

There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone. (and every time I bring this up, some one posts a link to thin-plastic keyboards from the 1970s, or the screens of the automated ticket stand at movie theaters as if they were the same.) The technology for understanding the shape of the finger when in contact with a touch sensitive display, and being able to reduce that amorphous blob down to a single pixel-- and get the pixel the user intended to touch, instead of the one at the center, or whatever, had never been done, let alone, tracking multiple fingers at the same time, a non-trivial problem. This invention enabled a raft of innovations that Apple spent 7 years developing that resulted in only the second new user interface paradigm in my lifetime- touch UI. (The first being the GUI, which was also developed under Steve Jobs.)

There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here. One manifestation of that ideology is support for things like welfare, etc, because they believe that it's just chance that separates Steve Jobs from you and me. (and not hard work.) Another manifestation of it is to pretend like the products of the mind have no value at all, and one way they like to do this is to pretend like its only "good marketing" that made the iPhone successful because it was just a random collection of parts that had been invented before.

Sure, LCD screens, Mac OS X, ARM CPUs, RAM, Flash memory and lithium polymer batteries existed before, and with the exception of OS X, all had appeared in other phones. To them, that means that there's nothing innovative about the iPhone. Innovation doesn't exist in their ideology, in fact, it demolishes their ideology, so they have to pretend like nothing was invented for the iPhone. Inevitably, when anyone expresses any defense of innovation you get a lot of nonsense claims about touch panel displays int he 1970s as if that were "prior art" for multi-touch. I've even seen people on Hacker News insist that Xerox invented the GUI. (showing either they don't know what a GUI is, or they don't care.)

To the extent that this ideology has succeeded in america, we have an economic depression, little growth in industry, a great shrinking in american manufacturing jobs (because this ideology has regulated them out of being competitive with the world market) etc.

This ideology might even succeed to the point where a major institution of this country, enshrined in the constitution itself, is destroyed, simply because Google wants to make a competitive phone without bothering to spend 7 years coming up with something innovative itself.

That would be a real shame... because the place that road leads is one where the president has a "kill switch" for the internet, things like SOPA are the law of the land, and startups have to get permission from government to operate their businesses, just like manufacturers do now, and said permission isn't going to come unless you have a lot of pull. We've seen what government control over the purse strings in an "innovative" area results in: Democratic contributors getting $500M loans from government for "green energy" only to go bust a few years later... its just a looting of the public for the direct benefit of politicians and their friends. This is the aristocracy of "pull".

It's instructive to remember that Theil is a prominent libertarian, and thus very clearly not a proponent of this ideology.

All this has happened before, and repeatedly. The USA is the last remaining beacon of innovation in the world. I understand that Hacker News is frequented by a lot of college age or early 20s hackers. Don't fall for the anti-innovation, anti-mind, anti-science, anti-intellectual ideology that says Apple is evil for inventing new things or putting the product and customer first, and those who just ship ripoff products are to be commended.

Don't fall for the claims that inventing is useless, and that america is destined to just be like china (Where everything we make is a ripoff of something invented somewhere else.)

To paraphrase Margarat Thatcher: The problem with not inventing anything yourself is, eventually you run out of other people's inventions to rip off.

In fact you can see this now: The android market is commoditized. Nobody is innovating, and nobody is making any money. In fact, Apples commanding %56 of the entire phone industries profits with only %5 of the smartphones, while most phones still aren't even smartphones. (this is why android marketshare is surging, its becoming the new feature phone).

This is a significant lesson for people who want to do startups. I learned it by trying to sell things on ebay when I was young:

If you don't have anything unique or innovative, you can only compete on price. And that's a race to the bottom.

To the extent that innovative companies can succeed, it is good for the startup economy. To the extent that anything innovative is ripped off, with no recourse, then the larger companies will maintain dominance because newer companies have nothing to compete with, and can't compete on economies of scale. The more things go that way, the less viable startups become and the less innovation society will have from which to benefit.

poppysan2• 15 years ago

You are digging a bit deep for the invention. That multi-touch is as important an innovation you claim it to be is yet to be seen. Then, to turn it to a higher argument (them vs. us style) about innovators and the us vs china is pretty far-reaching. Not to mention the false android claims, and pretty visible bias.

To quote you - "There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here." That ideology is that great passion, which you show, excuses false data and misleading talking points.

Of course this is my opinion, filled with my biases, so take it as you will.

nirvana16• 15 years ago

Do you realize you made several accusations against me, provided no facts to bolster them, and accused me of having "visible bias"? This communicates to me that when you hear something you agree with, you believe it to be "objective fact", but that anyone who disagrees is obviously "biased".

One of the things I am careful about, personally, is distinguishing between what I know, what I don't know, and what I believe. I cited facts that I know to be true, some that are obvious opinions (Eg: significance of something by definition is an opinion and "shows visible bias") and put forth hypothesis (e.g.: what I believe, and that is that there's an ideology at work here.)

If you don't see the "pretty visible bias" in things that you agree with, I think that can lead to mistakes. I recommend trying to find the faults in the arguments of people you agree with. If you can do that, you can produce even stronger arguments for your position, and you keep your mind sharp.

Anyway, as for the topic at hand, your response only serves provide supporting evidence for my hypothesis about ideology. I believe if that hypothesis were wrong, you'd have not made accusations against me, or if you did, you'd have supported them with facts, and that your primary objection wold be to an error of fact, or an error of belief on my part.

But in doing so, you provide a good example of what I'm talking about by ideology. Ideology is an act of faith, whereby you take your beliefs from another person or group, sans evidence, or by accepting their claims.

If you were responding to me on a philosophical basis, or simply on a factual basis, you would have had at your ready disposal philosophical (e.g.: logical) arguments, or specific facts that contradict my claims.

Please don't take offense here, none is intended. I'm simply disagreeing with you and explaining my perspective vis-a-vis your comments.

But this is also why I hesitate to post comments like the one you'r replying to to Hacker News. I don't find the charge of "pretty visible bias" (etc) to be.... interesting.... at all. (And the down votes I see I'm getting, for the "crime" of pointing out that the above response was personal rather than on the point, serve to further confirm my hypothesis. Hell, I even said "please don't take offense here" in response to someone who accused me of lying, but didn't even bother to be specific about what I was allegedly lying about!)

SomeCallMeTim• 15 years ago

The multi-touch interface was developed by Microsoft Research in 2001:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface

>There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here. One manifestation of that ideology is support for things like welfare, etc, because they believe that it's just chance that separates Steve Jobs from you and me. (and not hard work.)

Actually it's well demonstrated that you need to have money to make money. The few cases you can site as exceptions are exceptions, and for every exception I can point to a thousand (maybe a million?) people who work hard and are barely making ends meet. And each and every one of those exception stories contains a lot of luck. Claiming that hard work == success is insulting to all of the smart people who have failed, and truly insulting to the millions who work hard in ways that you're discounting as "work."

nirvana16• 15 years ago

The Microsoft Surface is not "multi-touch"[1]. It uses a completely different technology.

Further that wikipedia article shows that the someone had the idea in 2001. Good for them. The movie Minority Report came out in 2002, and was in pre-production for years before that. Thus the IDEA was not new. Nobody has claimed that the iPhone invented the IDEA.

That you make no distinction between someone expressing an idea, and an actual invention of a technology, shows that you're just reaching for excuses to rationalize your ideology.

Your attempt to insult my be claiming I denigrated people who work hard is also ... missing the mark.

Finally, the surface uses a completely different technology, which is driven by cameras, to the iPhone, and does not have the same capabilities as the iPhone.

So, even if the Surface itself had been invented in 2001 (rather than just the idea) it still wouldn't be applicable to this discussion.

This comment is exactly why I hesitate to post on Hacker News in the first place, and rarely respond to comments to my posts.

[1] this is a precise technological term trademarked by Apple whereby the impact area of a finger is resolved down to a single pixel, and multiple such fingers can be tracked simultaneously. The surface does not do this.

Samuel_Michon3• 15 years ago

"The multi-touch interface was developed by Microsoft Research in 2001"

It's much older. Multi-touch was invented in 1982, at the University of Toronto [1]. After that, it took quite a bit more research until an actual product was made that consumers could buy: in 1998, FingerWorks' launched its line of multi-touch keyboards [2]. FingerWorks was later bought by Apple, in 2005.

As an aside: Microsoft's Surface was announced in 2007 [1] and works with cameras instead of a capacitive touchscreen.

[1] http://billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html (author works at Microsoft, should be convincing enough to you)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerworks

Pewpewarrows3• 15 years ago

Yep, Xerox never invented the GUI. This entire product and all promotional videos and memories of it existing are a complete fabrication:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q

You've made similar posts in the past, and they've been similarly filled with rambling inaccuracies. I'll just leave it at that.

nirvana16• 15 years ago

I never said this video was a fabrication, or that Xerox never invented any key technologies, like, for instance, the Mouse.

Pretending that I did, is a bald faced lie on your part. You should consider the fact that, if you have to rely on outright fabrication about the position of your opponent, you don't have a very strong position to stand on yourself.

At best you're knocking down a strawman.

Either you're too ignorant of the history of computer science to understand what a GUI is, or you're simply being dishonest. Either way, I find the tendency of people such as yourself to post lies and then links to "supporting evidence" that don't even address the issue, while down voting everyone you disagree with to be... less than compatible with useful discussion.

The thing I learned a long time ago about liars is this: It doesn't matter how many time you prove them wrong, they'll just make up another lie!

Mvandenbergh3• 15 years ago

I don't pretend to understand what "welfare" (a program that has not existed for more than a decade) has to do with iPhones, but Peter Thiel is an ultra-libertarian who probably agrees with you and Hayek about the destructive effects of government social projects.

You also seem to simultaneously believe that there has been a great shrinking of American manufacturing jobs because this ideology has made the USA uncompetitive relative to the world market and that the USA is the last remaining beacon of innovation in the world. Well, which is it?

Anyway, American manufacturing jobs have disappeared mostly because of advances in automation technology - A great product of American and German cleverness and innovation.

For all that, the United States in the last two decades of the 20th and the first of the 21st centuries is more pro-business and pro-entrepreneurship than it ever had been before. The US at the height of its manufacturing heyday (when there were still many jobs in it) was a much more redistributionist society than it is now, marginal tax rates of more than 70%, anyone?

I do actually agree with you about the iPhone being an important innovation. The fact that crude versions of the technologies involved existed isn't really that relevant, implementation is everything. Let's be realistic, most innovative products combine existing ideas. That's how real innovation works, combining technologies that already exist in new ways.

BTW, the United States used British industrial innovations to kick start its own industrial revolution (before international patent treaties). Once Americans started making industrial machinery of course, they swiftly gained enough hands on experience to start tinkering and innovating. It was common wisdom in the early 19th century that American manufactured goods were inferior to British. After all, weren't they just copies? Then in the 1970s when the first Japanese cars were imported into the US, Americans believed that these were just copies of American ideas (which they were of course, Americans developed the assembly line made car) and that the Japanese could only ever compete on price.

Now of course, people assume that the Chinese will never start innovating and only copy American or Japanese products.

matwood2• 15 years ago

Anyway, American manufacturing jobs have disappeared mostly because of advances in automation technology - A great product of American and German cleverness and innovation.

Yep. http://blog.american.com/2011/01/the-demise-of-america%E2%80...

Now of course, people assume that the Chinese will never start innovating and only copy American or Japanese products.

Innovation is an interesting thing. I think culture feeds a lot into innovation. I wonder if the Chinese government will continue to bend enough to let innovation occur or will it hit some limit?

As an interesting aside, I was at a conference a few years ago on web services. While watching some of the presentations it dawned on me that anytime pricing or some other hard to get exactly right decision came up the students from China always defaulted to having a central authority make the decision. The students from the US always used some market mechanism/crowd sourcing option. The culture that the students grew up in clearly had an impact on their solutions.

nirvana16• 15 years ago

"Welfare" is a general term that applies to a series of programs that date back to the 1930s, in the USA. So, it's existed for much more than a decade. I think we might be misunderstanding each other here.

Peter Theil is, you're right, a libertarian, as I mentioned. Libertarians are those who believe in the non-aggression principle. The nonaggression principle simply stated is this: "The initiation of force against an innocent person is immoral." You're correct that Peter and I agree with this. But that doesn't mean we necessarily agree in other areas. However, I suspect Peter is a fan of Hayek, and I am certainly a fan of the Austrian economists of that school, though they don't always agree, they do share the thesis that, when people are free to choose, rather than having choices forced on them by violence, the economy does better.

There's no contradiction between the claim that american manufacturing is not competitive, and america is still an innovative country. Just because America is still innovative (even if it is on the decline) doesn't presume that there's no innovation, and my general point is to argue, in fact, for the innovation of a particular american designed product.

You're right that american manufacturing has benefited from automation. In fact, american manufacturing capacity is higher than it has been in the past. But the jobs have not disappeared because of automation. Economically, automation tends to create more jobs, by providing increased leverage of each worker. American manufacturing jobs have disappeared because they are no longer competitive globally, because regulation, which allows unions to force employees to join the union, and which forced employers to deal with unions, which give unions a stranglehold on the companies. Companies which are able to avoid it via automation survive, those that can't- like much of the car industry- go bankrupt.

Please notice that I did not bring up tax policies in my article. There are many ways to measure whether a country is "pro-business and pro-entrepreneurship". Specifically I was talking about regulations.

However, since you have brought up taxation, please be aware that there are two forms of redistribution. While the tax rates may be low, we have seen record "redistribution" of wealth in the past decade. The government spent $4T in only the past severel years, in fact, which is such a massive sum that the only way to wrap your head around it is to recognize that before this happened there were only $10T in money supply in existence!

That is effectively a %40 inflation rate, cumulative, and consequently a massive hidden tax on the people.

You're absolutely right that the USA used british industrial innovation to kickstart our industrial revolution, and I don't begrudge the Japanes, or the Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc, from doing similar deals to kickstart their industrial revolutions.

The massive increase in overall wealth in China and India-- at least a doubling of the average income for over 2Billion people over 20 years, is long-term very good for the world.

Further, economics is not a zero sum game, thus it is not the case that for China and India to lift their people out of poverty, the USA has to suffer.

No, all of the wounds the USA is suffering are self inflicted.

PS- apologies to everyone else in the western hemisphere for using the term "america" to refer to the USA. I know, south america is also "america" as well. Its an old habit.

kmm• 15 years ago

I think you're projecting. I have never been enthralled by any of Apple's products and certainly not multi-touch. Calling people anti-intellectual because they're against Apple is ludicrous.

My problem with Apple and especially Steve Jobs is that I'm allergic to reality-distortion fields. And the unfailing hypocrisy. I distinctly remember Jobs saying "Good artists copy, great artists steal" [1]. Sometimes innovation is using other ideas and combining them, and then they're saying that Android is a rip-off of their product and they won't rest until it is destroyed.

[1] http://www.skuggen.com/2010/03/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-we-steal...

recoiledsnake2• 15 years ago

>. I've even seen people on Hacker News insist that Xerox invented the GUI. (showing either they don't know what a GUI is, or they don't care.)

Why don't you tell us what a GUI is, even if it's a personal definition?

You've come up with multiple posts where you claim Xerox didn't invent the GUI and dismissed anyone who said otherwise as being anti-Apple, but have never presented a shred of evidence or even an argument that Xerox didn't invent the GUI.

chollida15• 15 years ago

> There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone

EDIT I see that in another comment you refine y our statement to mean, only multi touch capacitance. Our technology uses camera to achieve multi touch.

This is simple false.

I worked for a company that made touch screens in the early 2000's. We had multi touch in 2000.

Our products are sold to schools where more than 1 million kids go to a classroom with one in it each and every day.

Please don't say things like "there were no multi touch devices before the iPhone" when this is so provably false. There was a multi billion dollar market of multi touch devices in schools before the iPhone was first revealed.

nirvana16• 15 years ago

There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone was introduced. Nobody has provided a single piece of evidence of someone else showing the same technology. I never said there were no touch devices, and there were, in fact, "multi-touch" devices where your touch closed two switches. This is not the same.

The real problem is, either you're so ignorant of the technology in question that you don't realize your claim is false... or that your ideology leads you to not care.

BTW, if you want to make a claim like that, you could at least provide a citation of the actual name of the product so I can research it. But I don't think you care... you jut want to assert I'm wrong ,and act like you've proven me wrong, when the reverse is true.

Its sad that Hacker News has such a contingent of anti-intellectual, anti-technology, anti-innovation people that you can post these kinds of lies and not feel any shame.

Well, I guess that's not quite true. You felt enough shame to omit the name of the product you're "citing".

10100101112• 15 years ago

It's a design breakthrough. What's inside, the inexpensive, mass-produced components, is more or less the same as what's in all the competing devices. But the design, the packaging, is a breakthrough.

What's problematic about this Apple popularism and Apple's hermetically sealed approach to selling computing devices is that it does not encourage, let alone even permit, people to learn about what's on the inside and how it works. These are computing devices, not refrigerators.

And in the _grand scheme_ of things, that inhibits progress. It limits the potential pool of competitors and innovators.

Though it preserves the competitive advantage of businesses like Apple, Intel and others. Increased consumer uptake fueled by elegant design certainly furthers what they can do. But the incentives for them to innovate are limited. Do the minimum. Reap the maximum. That's just smart business.

jarcoal• 15 years ago

It's easy to think that it does limit progress, but it likely does not. Any company that can get people to excited about technology will positively contribute to the future of the industry.

It is probably an extremely controversial thought, but Apple might be responsable for pushing more people into development/engineer jobs than Linux. I know I found my passion for technology through Apple, which eventually led me to Linux. I bet I'm not alone.

10100101112• 15 years ago

I anticipated this response. That is why I emphasize _grand scheme_. Short term, I agree with you. Long term, I do not.

danso• 15 years ago

Sometimes, refinement is a breakthrough.

The AK-47 was not the first automatic rifle nor the most powerful or advanced. But because of its clean design and deployability, it is likely the most significant firearm in modern human history.

What about those statistics that show that a relative modest reduction in consumption would do more to save the environment and energy supplies than any foreseeable technological breakthrough in the next 50 years? Any refinement of technology today to reduce consumption would likely bore someone like Thiel; at the same time, they may also do more to save the world. Why is break-out innovation not to be respected?

poppysan2• 15 years ago

I agree that it was not a great technological breakthrough on it's own, but it is greatly responsible for a lot of folk's interest in new technology and programming among other things, which should not be understated.

ramanujan6• 15 years ago

The fundamental reason that most innovation has occurred in the computer/internet sector over the last 40-something years is that failure is acceptable in this sector. That is, when a computer or webapp crashes it's not the end of the world. But a failure in a drug or car or power plant means serious consequences, and sometimes fatalities, and subsequent regulations/laws to make sure such things are never tried again.

Now, you can make a pretty convincing argument[0] that we are as a society committing Bastiat's fallacy ("Seen vs. Unseen"), in that there are more lives lost due to not developing new drugs than there are due to failures of new drugs.

The failures are seen, the lack of new drugs is not seen.

However, the deeper point is that we are currently simply too wealthy as a society to tolerate the human costs (in deaths[1]) associated with rapid innovation in real world technologies. Wealth means necessities are met, but necessity is the mother of invention. This is why war and serious hardship gooses technological innovation. It's because life becomes cheaper, and test pilots and volunteers for new vaccines become more readily available.

I don't think Thiel would disagree[2] with this analysis, but it does mean that the problem can't be solved simply through shifts in entrepreneurial focus. Americans simply aren't ready for the kind of messiness that real world innovation involves.

[0] http://bit.ly/mtGRyv

[1] Perhaps strangely, we are more ready to allow people to take futile risks like bungee jumping or skydiving than we are to allow people to consciously opt out of various health/safety/etc. regulations (and suffer the consequences).

[2] Taking the totality of his statements in context, including the article on the Founders Fund website ("What Happened to the Future?"), Thiel and Levchin's point is not that the iPhone isn't innovative but more that there hasn't been much innovation in big areas like energy, medicine, and transportation. Indeed, by some measures we're moving backwards in those areas: the real price of energy has gone up, new drug approvals have stagnated, and top speeds have gone down since the Concorde was retired.

Mvandenbergh3• 15 years ago

Drug trials fail all the time though, and not only because of risk aversion.

If you look at the first 50 years or so of the pharmaceutical industry, there were wonder drugs being discovered every year. We may simply have exhausted a lot of the low hanging small molecule fruit.

Also, if risk aversion was slowing pharma innovation then we'd see a lot of potentially efficacious compounds failing safety trials. Instead what we see is that the cost to discover candidate compounds before they're ever tested on humans.

ramanujan6• 15 years ago

It's absolutely true that risk aversion is not the only thing holding back drug trials. But it's definitely part of the problem.

Think about insulin. In 1921 Banting and Best had the idea. It was in a patient's arm by 1922. And they won the Nobel Prize by 1923.

  http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/insulin/discovery-insulin.html

  Early in 1921, Banting took his idea to Professor John 
  Macleod at the University of Toronto, who was a leading 
  figure in the study of diabetes in Canada. Macleod didn't 
  think much of Banting's theories. Despite this, Banting 
  managed to convince him that his idea was worth trying. 
  Macleod gave Banting a laboratory with a minimum of 
  equipment and ten dogs. Banting also got an assistant, a 
  medical student by the name of Charles Best. The 
  experiment was set to start in the summer of 1921.

  ...

  In January 1922 in Toronto, Canada, a 14-year-old boy, 
  Leonard Thompson, was chosen as the first person with 
  diabetes to receive insulin. The test was a success. 
  Leonard, who before the insulin shots was near death, 
  rapidly regained his strength and appetite. The team now 
  expanded their testing to other volunteer diabetics, who 
  reacted just as positively as Leonard to the insulin 
  extract.

  The news of the successful treatment of diabetes with 
  insulin rapidly spread outside of Toronto, and in 1923 the 
  Nobel Committee decided to award Banting and Macleod the 
  Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

That was before the FDA gained the power of premarket approval, a time when pharma moved at the speed of software. Nowadays that past is characterized as a time of patent medicines and scam artists. But if you actually get into the history books you'll see that description is like characterizing the modern internet as a giant repository of spam and scams. In other words, absolutely that spam/scam stuff existed (and indeed crystals and faith healing persist to the present day), but real innovation in drugs also occurred at the same time.

The fundamental point there is that Banting and Best could do empirical human trials. You can't predict what a novel drug will do without humans who are willing to risk their lives. In computers these people are called early adopters.

  If risk aversion was slowing pharma innovation then we'd 
  see a lot of potentially efficacious compounds failing 
  safety trials. Instead what we see is that the cost to 
  discover candidate compounds before they're ever tested on 
  humans.

Yes, the thing is that drug companies face a significant penalty with the FDA if they fail a safety trial. It's not just a one off, it influences the FDA's perception of them as a "reputable" company. If the FDA thinks of you as disreputable or a cowboy, they will inspect the hell out of you and issue Form 483s [0] till the cows come home. And that's not even including the PR impact and the market sell-off should you ever actually have a TGN 1412 incident[1].

So there is a very significant economic risk to "failing fast" in pharma. Over and above the hit to brand, if the PR fallout is bad enough the FDA has a number of tools with which to criminalize failure. The Park Doctrine[2] is what they do for "off-label marketing", and they would escalate considerably if they felt public opinion demanded it.

Anyway, this is why drug companies are doing all these simulations and iterating primarily around drug molecules that are known to be safe. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for trying molecules compliant with Lipinski's rule of five[3]. Sure, that's still a pretty wide class of molecules, but "radical innovation" in compounds is just not going to fly with the FDA.

After all, it took the FDA more than a decade to begin considering adaptive clinical trials[4] in lieu of the standard Phase I/II/III design. How long will it take them to agree that aging could be treated as a disease, or to allow the development of enhancing drugs?

These things probably won't happen until there's some sort of major conflict in which enhancing drugs become the difference between victory and defeat. Then the floodgates will open.

[0] http://blog.fdazilla.com/2011/09/fda-will-issue-10000-483s-i...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412

[2] http://www.gatewayfda.com/fda-regulations/under-park-doctrin...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druglikeness

[4] http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/102/16/1217.extract

Vindexus• 15 years ago

According to Guns, Germs and Steel, necessity is not the mother of invention. In fact the opposite is true: inventions appear when the needs of the inventors are already met.

I really recommend the book, it's a great read.

ramanujan6• 15 years ago

Jared Diamond notwithstanding, WW2 led directly or indirectly to:

  1. The atomic bomb
  2. Jet aircraft
  3. The digital computer
  4. Modern rocketry

And the Cold War gave rise to

  1. The internet
  2. The space program
  3. The interstate highway system

These are the kinds of big swings that Thiel is talking about and that's just off the top of my head. You can go through previous wars as well. Wouldn't be surprised if WW1 was a real shot in the arm for aviation, for example.

Probably the biggest peacetime innovation since the end of the Cold War has been the sequencing of the human genome. But arguably that was also a computer science innovation, as it revolved around better assembly algorithms and required no test pilots, clinical trials, or atomic bomb detonations.

WalterBright7• 15 years ago

Sam Peltzman's book "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" makes a statistical case that the FDA's "safe and effective" mandate has cost more lives than it has saved.

From the back cover: "The 1962 Amendments by Sam Peltzman concludes that the 1962 ("proof of efficacy") amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (1) have cut the number of new drugs (new chemical entities) brought to the market each year by half with no corresponding reduction in inefficacious drugs, (2) have doubled the costs of drug development, (3) have have increased drug prices by reducing competition among drugs (so that the sick pay $50 million more each year for drugs), and (4) have imposed substantial net social costs from death and illnesses that could have been prevented if the development of new drugs had not been hampered by the amendments. These conclusions are reached despite the fact that Professor Peltzman has assumed for the amendments benefits that cannot be proven and may not have taken place."

cma• 15 years ago

HIV has been cured for Simian monkeys for quite a while because we could invasively experiment on them; so, the FDA stopping us from invasively experimenting (including involuntary innoculation of disease free subjects) on humans may have "statistically" cost more lives than it saved, but you'd have to be a Nazi to advocate it.

potatolicious• 15 years ago

I disagree. The reason why the most innovation has occurred in this sector is because we're some of the best-funded. Look at the arms industry and you will see a similar pace of advancement - mostly due to the bottomless and nigh-unchallengeable defense spending of Uncle Sam.

Why this unprecedented level of funding? IMO this really is the heart of Thiel's argument: internet companies are capable of general obscene, absurd, ludicrous profit margins.

Think about a company like Facebook - employs a few thousand engineers, but generates revenue and impact far in excess of what you might expect from a crowd of that size.

And this is really Thiel's argument, the way I understand it. He's not saying that the iPhone isn't a "technological" breakthrough, but rather it's not a "societal" breakthrough. In the old days, when someone introduces a product, it creates new jobs across the board.

When Ford introduced a new car, it didn't just mean jobs for the people in the boardroom and drafting tables. It created jobs in their factories, and indeed tens of thousands of jobs across a wide supply chain necessary to build the product. It created new jobs in dealerships, and auto shops. The job-creation effects of a product were incredibly far-reaching.

Now, fast forward to today. What jobs are Facebook creating besides the ones inside their walls? There is no employment ecosystem, no supply chain. And in this way, while Facebook is extracting record revenue from their business, the rest of America is no better off.

It used to be that success in capitalism is the tide that floats all boats, but this is increasingly not true, especially in our sector.

ramanujan6• 15 years ago

  Look at the arms industry and you will see a similar pace 
  of advancement - mostly due to the bottomless and nigh-
  unchallengeable defense spending of Uncle Sam.

But I don't think you're really disagreeing here.

The DoD is a lot less squeamish than civilians about experimental projects that result in death. Leave aside the issue of whether this is good or bad. For them, they are going to be seeing dead bodies as a natural course of doing business, and they want fewer ones, and so they're (much) more willing to pursue riskier projects that may cost lives.

Soldiers can be ordered to run into enemy fire, so they can also be ordered to test drive automatic cars (funded by DARPA). Autonomous helicopters that could slice someone in two if the programming goes bad nevertheless get the green light because there are already people being sliced in two, and DoD wants to reduce that number.

DoD is really pushing robotics and cybernetics forward in particular because those two result in less dead soldiers and (in the future) soldiers who can function even after losing limbs and eyes[0].

Perhaps the most concrete example of this thesis is what happens when the priorities of DoD and FDA collide. Take a look at the Pathways to Innovation program that FDA just greenlit[1].

  On a Tuesday afternoon call with reporters, Shuren said he 
  expects just one or two devices to be approved through the 
  new pathway each year.

  The first device up for review under the new pathway comes 
  from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 
  (DARPA), the research arm of the Department of Defense.

  The brain-controlled prosthetic is designed to restore 
  near-natural arm, hand, and finger function to patients 
  suffering from spinal cord injury, stroke, or amputation. 
  An implanted microchip on the surface of the brain records 
  neuronal activity, decodes the signals, and activates 
  motor neurons that control the prosthesis.

  The first chip will be implanted in a patient within six 
  months, Geoffrey Ling, MD, PhD, program manager at DARPA, 
  told reporters.

There is a very good reason why no private company has yet gotten this kind of fast track, but the DoD has. From FDA's perspective, DoD is a (more powerful) fellow agency which deserves professional courtesy. Moreover, FDA doesn't suspect DoD of just being in this to make money. Thus a dot mil is allowed to play by fundamentally different rules than a dot com.

This is my point: when lives are on the line, people will be willing to risk lives to innovate. If not, then not.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW78wbN-WuU

[1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/FDAGeneral/24...

gradstudent• 15 years ago

How is the iPhone (and FB and Twitter) not a societal breakthrough? Each has developed entire ecosystems around their respective platforms. Hundreds of companies exist and thrive because of these technologies. Their impact on the global economy, and on job-creation, is much larger than the sum of the engineers within their walls.

chollida15• 15 years ago

Here is where the first footnote[0] links to:

http://progressivefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/06.2011...

Someone• 15 years ago

I would say it is because a) there is a lot of money to be made and b) Moore's law forces one to move fast to corner a market because one can almost guarantee that someone will disrupt it within a few years.

Early customers were knowledgeable about this. Because of that, they accepted (partial) failure of products in exchange for earlier delivery and/or lower prices. Those customers, in turn 'educated' the masses to accept crashing products.

krausejj• 15 years ago

We've had tremendous innovation in the medical field - just look at life expectancies over the last few decades. Thiel's argument on transportation is also weak - cars/planes haven't gotten faster but they've gotten much more efficient.

The biggest innovation failure lies with the government. And governments can certainly test things out and 'fail' as we can in consumer Internet. In fact these days, almost every government policy seems to fail!

This is probably due to the cumbersome nature of the democratic process - whereas entrepreneurs can quickly disrupt inefficient systems and rely on the market to validate them.

ajkessler3• 15 years ago

“Five hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy ? It may not be enough to dramatically improve living standards in the U.S. over the next decade or two decades.”

It's strange that someone as successful as Peter Thiel has been in the startup world, a world built on providing value, would make such a statement. What does the number of permanent or semi-permanent jobs have to do with the amount of value being created by something like twitter? If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not.

If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own.

Also, he seems to equate increased $$ with increased living standards. By and large that's been historically true, but it's a bit misleading. Even if twitter made 0 money and created 0 jobs, it would still improve living standards. Certainly not in the way indoor plumbing or electricity raised living standards, but it still makes people's lives easier, which, by definition, improves living standards.

AlisdairO6• 15 years ago

> If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not. > If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own.

I think it depends, really. Historically, talented people have created new industries/companies that employed a lot of less talented people and allowed them to live a comfortable life. I suspect the focus of his worry is that these less talented people are nowadays less often reaping the benefits of the innovations talented people create.

ajkessler3• 15 years ago

Historically, those industries required less talented people in order to stay in business. Somebody has to sell the product, answer the phones, sweep the floors, etc. If you created a company that could operate with out all of those less talented people, this would be a boon.

Even if you presume all those less talented employees are mindless drones, if you can provide the same service with fewer employees, you now have all the value created by that service, plus you have all those extra mindless drones to go produce value someplace else.

As to your second point, I can't imagine that's what he's really thinking. The few talented people who create the twitters, iphones, etcs, are far outnumbered by the millions of less-talented people who actually use those products.

pacala• 15 years ago

> If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own.

I wonder what your plan is to gainfully employ 7 billion talented people that are freed up. Do you envision a world where 7 billion people come up each with a revolutionary change that improves some aspect of shelter/feed/transport/communicate/socialize/entertain/learn fundamental needs that people have?

Zarathust• 15 years ago

A lot of innovation we're seeing now is the result of miniaturization of older technologies, such as touchscreen, cell phones and computers. I'd say that the IPhone is rather an innovation in the lifestyle of their owners, more than a technological innovation per se.

I've been arguing this point for a few years now, that smartphones are cool devices, but rather fall in the gadget category than the civilization changing techs they are sometimes compared to.

joshu• 15 years ago

Technological, no. UI/UX? Definitely.

gamble• 15 years ago

"Innovation" is a glittering generality that tech companies and their admirers feel obliged to assume, but most successful companies are built on execution rather than innovation.

Apple is actually an exemplar of execution over innovation. Since Jobs returned, none of their genre-defining products have been fundamentally novel. Even the iPad represents a category people have been trying to get right for twenty years without success. Apple likes to identify markets with demand but immature products, so that they can learn from the mistakes of earlier entrants and launch with an extremely polished, market defining product.

I don't hold this approach against Apple. On the contrary, I wish there were more companies that obsessed about creating polished, highly-functional products that run a little behind the technological curve, rather than the slapped-together assemblages of new parts from Asian electronics manufacturers' supply catalog that typify the industry.

sendos• 15 years ago

> "I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough"

Isn't this essentially a strawman, since no one is claiming that the iPhone is a Technological Breakthrough?

At the time the iPhone came out, lots of people noted that it actually lagged technologically behind its smartphone peers (no 3G, subpar SMS functionality, etc), which was correct. And yet it won, it showed smartphone companies how to make a smartphone, and they have been copying that design/approach ever since.

The iPhone didn't win because it was a technological breakthrough, and everyone in tech knows this, so I'm not sure why Thiel's comment is that noteworthy.

sehugg• 15 years ago

The App Store and VoiceOver. The former shifted the power balance between devs and carriers (creating thousands of jobs) and the latter has changed the lives of many visually-impaired.

I understand the iPhone ref is a strawman, but not a very good one.

andyl• 15 years ago

Lots of comments here defending Apple. I think the relevant question is: why don't we see more innovation in energy, transportation or medicine?

shn• 15 years ago

I am totally disagree. Although the breakthroughs in the tech scene are not as groundbreaking as it seems, the implications for social interaction, commerce and education is astounding. I believe we are yet to see the fruits of internet and related technologies in the years ahead of us. Khan Academy, Stanford's online classes, and tons of other educational material available through internet I believe effecting a lot of people's lives.

loup-vaillant• 15 years ago

> Having a fully functioning computer in your pocket opens up entirely new experiences—and markets. […] Social media, combined with mobile technologies, are powering protests and revolutions around the world and changing the way people consume information.

While I somewhat agree with this, I can't help but feel that much more is possible[1]. With current technology. If people actually owned their pocket computers, both in theory[2] and in practice[3], the changes would be much more profound.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/2c/a_sense_that_more_is_possible

[2] http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

[3] http://vpri.org/ http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

Peter Thiel: "I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough"

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