Wired on Friday:Now, said my friend, with a tired look in his eyes from his late nights at an internet startup, is an incredibly unexciting time to be a programmer in Silicon Valley, writes Danny O'Brien
He's right. Even though we are, by all accounts, at the very height of this Web 2.0 mini-boom, where money is flowing freely again and too many venture capitalists are chasing too few geeks (the unbearable in pursuit of the unintelligible, as they say), for the brightest and most creative of the hacker tribe, we are truly into the ennui phase of the cycle.
Right now, gathering together some money and running a business is a largely a matter of plotting out in more and more tedious detail the wild dreams that a few garage hackers had in 2001-2004. "That's just an implementation detail" is the most damning criticism the restless geek has around here.
Hungering to go off and find the "Next Big Thing" is a lot harder when so many people will pay you to finish off the "Last Potentially Profitable Opportunity".
The good news is that a few are getting a scent for what that "Next Big Thing" might be, and are beginning to investigate the leads that will take them through the next downturn and beyond.
The bad news is that the source of that scent may be 7,000 miles away, in Guangdong, China. And the downturn for Silicon Valley, California may be permanent.
Here are some intimations of what that future might be. First, a recent talk by Matt Webb and Jack Schulze. Both are already some 5,000 miles away from the Valley, based as they are in London. Nonetheless, the pair are highly regarded in the Valley, and somewhat of a geek colony of the Web 2.0 boom themselves.
Schulze and Webb spend their days in the nitty gritty of net development, designing user interfaces in the reality-tied world of Nokia and the UK prison service.
But when they're not working on working products, they're also employed to grope their way to the "Next Big Thing". Examples of their wilder fancies: a prototype mobile phone that's made from a metal that melts at exactly 47 degrees (positive side: amazing customisable for each user; negative: poisonous) or a USB dooda that makes a small model effigy of your friend leap to attention when they appear on instant messenger.
Strange side-alleys off the main street of technology right now - but with one theme running through them. Two people, working from England, can manufacture and demonstrate all of this equipment, even though it is made of incredibly exotic materials, or highly specific electronics, or precisely specified adhesives.
"These days, I can pick up the phone to a glue manufacturer, and ask them to make me an adhesive that will stick X to Y, at exactly this temperature - and they'll make me 300ml of it for a few quid", says Schulze.
This is the world of bespoke, just-in-time material manufacture, allowing even small start-ups to access the skills of light and heavy industry for the smallest projects.
Another example of this tipping point is the One Laptop Per Child project. This MIT-connected attempt to provide a cheap - $120 (€92.30) or less - machine for students in developing countries has many fascinating angles, not least of which is whether it will succeed or not. But what's significant in this context is that the academics working on its innovative screen and touchpad technologies were able to prototype and mass-manufacture radically new approaches with minimal friction.
Designs were specified, those specs sent off to Asia, created, and tested in months, not years, with a process and budget that were perfectly accessible to a group with no corporate track record in mass production.
The reason why, in part, is revealed in a blog by one of the innovators currently walking this route. Bunnie Huang, the San Diego-based hacker working at hardware start-up Chumby, recently documented his visit to the SEG electronics market in Shenzhen, on the mainland Chinese coast closest to Hong Kong.
Imagine a standard indoor market, with families running small three- by six-foot booths selling their goods from trays and boxes piled high in front of them.
But instead of trainers and plastic toys, these flea-market retailers will you sell you resistors and capacitors, memory chips and computer motherboards, gigabytes of Ram, and the fresh guts of digital cameras and printers. Next to them, technical books that would cost hundreds of euro in the West are available for a few dollars.
And as Bunnie says, just a few hours drive north are "probably 200 factories that can take any electronics idea and pump them out by the literal boatload".
The closest relative to this fertile environment was Silicon Valley in the 1970s, when shoestring entrepreneurs built multi-billion dollar industries using parts begged and borrowed from the nearby Californian chip factories.
Now those chip factories have moved East - but access to them and similar industrial processes has spread across the world. Does it matter that this next Silicon Valley is in China? Not to the current generation, e-mailing their designs across from West to East.
For most hackers and creators of technology, place is no object. And that future already looks vibrant enough to tempt genius engineers to walk into the new just-in-time, on-demand hardware culture of the "Next Big Thing".
