Apple and Obama : and Marc Andreessen

[Owen Densmore]

The NewYorker has an article on the state of the nation speech, and why manufacturing is not coming back to the US:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/01/apple-and-obama.html

..including an older link to Mark Andreessen's WSJ post on why it doesn't matter:

http://goo.gl/IcFQP

.. because Software Is Everything.

This is an interesting discussion.  I like Andreessen's pollyanna view of software .. an old song that still plays well factually.

But I think there are mfg capabilities we must maintain.  For example, I "buy" Obama's saving the auto industry, but not his bailout of the banks.  I don't mind Apple going to asia for the iPhone.  But my intuition is that certain mfg is important because of its critical importance, on the one hand, and it's experimental nature on the other.  By the latter, I mean the conversion from research to practice.

In talking about challenges in this new paradigm, Marc mentions:

Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There's no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

I know its an old, old observation that our educational system is vital, and we should be inviting folks from abroad here to help make our research and development soar, but it's none the less true.  And why SFX is so compelling.

Now if only washington could "get it".

   -- Owen

[Gary Schiltz]

I suspect the demand is, shall we say, slightly less in Santa Fe?

;; Gary

On Jan 28, 2012, at 12:57 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

In talking about challenges in this new paradigm, Marc mentions:

[...] every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want [...]