Read this, and understand my vision for Hawaii's future software industry.
http://www.paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html
During the Bubble, a lot of people predicted that startups would
outsource their development to India. I think a better model for the
future is David Heinemeier Hansson, who outsourced his development to
a more powerful language instead. A lot of well-known applications are
now, like BaseCamp, written by just one programmer. And one guy is
more than 10x cheaper than ten, because (a) he won't waste any time in
meetings, and (b) since he's probably a founder, he can pay himself
nothing.
Thats one man (or woman) with one inexpensive computer, running Free and
Open Source software and some time.
Largely because of Sarbanes-Oxley, few startups go public now. For all
practical purposes, succeeding now equals getting bought. Which means
VCs are now in the business of finding promising little 2-3 man
startups and pumping them up into companies that cost $100 million to
acquire. They didn't mean to be in this business; it's just what their
business has evolved into.
Hence the fourth problem: the acquirers have begun to realize they can
buy wholesale. Why should they wait for VCs to make the startups they
want more expensive? Most of what the VCs add, acquirers don't want
anyway. The acquirers already have brand recognition and HR
departments. What they really want is the software and the developers,
and that's what the startup is in the early phase: concentrated
software and developers.
HOSEF's mission needs tweaking. Introducing kids to computers is
interesting and exciting, but Hawaii needs more startups, more
businesses that can be run out of a spare bedroom or two. I don't come
to denigrate the efforts thus far, but I do think that HOSEF may be soon
mired in "open source as its own end". We put computers in public
schools, but what do we do with them, other than load them with a
Windows alternative? We teach kids how to tear the machine to bits
and re-assemble it, but what then? Knowing how to field-strip and
re-assemble your rifle is a necessary skill, but it won't help you hit
the target.
Linux on the Desktop is an interesting debate, but Hawaii needs highly
profitable businesses that don't involve huge capital outlays for
manufacturing lines and hardware development not endless debate about
Gnome .vs KDE .vs MacOS .vs WinXP/Vista, or even "SUSE .vs Red Hat .vs
Debian .vs Fedora .vs Ubuntu .vs <roll your own>.
I fear that "using FOSS in your business" by way of endorsing Linux
Desktops just continues the oligarchy where dreams end at middle
management in the corporate drone world. Hawaii has too much of that
already.
Quoting Paul Graham again (http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html)
Windows can and will be overthrown, but not by giving people a better
desktop OS. The way to kill it is to redefine the problem as a
superset of the current one. The problem is not, what operating system
should people use on desktop computers? but how should people use
applications? There are answers to that question that don't even
involve desktop computers.
HOSEF should find a way to teach classes in Ruby and Python and (yes,
I'll say it), Lisp for those few who are driven to the final
understanding. We could train hundreds, if not thousands of young,
bright minds to develop web-based applications in Python and Ruby with
little more than what we have on-hand now and a few bright, motivated
mentors. Let O'Reilly slather away book after book on Java and Perl,
these are the C++ and Fortran of tomorrow. We should understand that
the jobs of tomorrow are those jobs that are created in startups, not
working in IT in the back of some hotel. (Apologies to any on-list who
do this.)
I don't think people consciously realize this, but one reason downwind
jobs like churning out Java for a bank pay so well is precisely that
they are downwind. The market price for that kind of work is higher
because it gives you fewer options for the future. A job that lets you
work on exciting new stuff will tend to pay less, because part of the
compensation is in the form of the new skills you'll learn.
Grad school is the other end of the spectrum from a coding job at a
big company: the pay's low but you spend most of your time working on
new stuff. And of course, it's called "school," which makes that clear
to everyone, though in fact all jobs are some percentage school.
The right environment for having startup ideas need not be a
university per se. It just has to be a situation with a large
percentage of school.
Now go back and re-read that bit. School. Learning. Gaining knowledge.
HOSEF could even become the "Y-combiner" of Hawaii, taking a stake in
its startups, and using the funds derived to seed new startups and
further increase its education efforts.
In the past, I've taught secretaries to program. I've taught
microbiology graduates to program. I taught (and continue to teach)
myself to program.
My (nearly) eight year-old son has a keen interest in robots, guess what
he'll be doing soon...
Just some ideas, a bit more "bomb throwing" @ 4am.
jim
