Silicon Valley should fight laws controlling innovation, says veteran valley entrepeneur
By Tom Foremski - July 15, 2005
Silicon Valley could face additional laws limiting technology innovation unless it gets active in politics and lobbies hard to protect its digital freedoms. That was the view of Joe Kraus, a Silicon Valley veteran and an avid angel investor.
Lunch with Joe is always a treat, not just because he picks up the tab but because I get to pick his brains about all sorts of issues and trends. As a veteran of the first search engine wars, when he co-founded Excite, and now heading a corporate wiki company JotSpot, Joe sees a lot more than many, and he has a lot invested in Silicon Valley innovation through his angel investments.
One of the things on Joe's mind is how cleverly Hollywood managed to control innovation. What do you mean by "control," I asked?
"Hollywood is very good at the political process and it managed to get the digital millennium copyright act passed." This essentially gives Hollywood control over innovation, because it gets to approve appropriate technologies and therefor development.
Silicon Valley companies have traditionally paid scant attention to Washington, and have not learned how to play the lobbying games. While older tech companies like Texas Instruments, Intel, and a few others have large staffs in Washington.D.C, they are still less than equal to a force to be felt.
Joe recently joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that works to protect digital civil liberties. And he founded the 50,000 member strong lobbying group DigitalConsumer.org.
Last month I met with 463 Communications, a PR firm that is helping tech companies become involved in the public political process. It's a small move in the right direction.
What else is Joe wondering about? "There seems to be a giant sucking sound from Google as it pulls in top engineering talent and technologies," he said.
Earlier this year I saw Eric Schmidt on Charlie Rose and he said graduates are told that if they want to change the world they should choose Google because it has the largest scale and is best placed to achieve their goals. "That's a killer pitch," he said. I know, what can you say to that?
I've been wondering if Google and Yahoo will buy up all the cool emerging companies. And isn't this bad for innovation because there are a small number of bidders for young companies?
They essentially control valuations of startups and that means a lower return for investors.
The same is true in enterprise software markets BTW. Lower returns, equals less investment in future ventures.
We chatted about so many things that we forgot to chat about JotSpot, Joe's current tech focus. Fortunately, the always excellent Dan Farber, at ZDNet met with Joe that day too, and wrote about what is new about JotSpot:
JotSpot reorients itself by ZDNet's Dan Farber -- Joe Kraus of Jotspot came by my office today and we chatted for about 30 minutes about how his wiki-based platform and applications are evolving. Joe has ample Web 1.0 experience in building a Web-centric products and company. He was one the co-founders of the pre-Google search engine Excite (which then became part of the highly touted but now extinct [...]
Here is our interview with Joe from earlier this year.
Joe's blog is here: http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/
By Tom Foremski - July 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comment
| Category: Thoughtleaders
| SVW Toolbar | SVW Newsletter | SVW Mobile
- NEW STORIES:
- Intel Experiment Could Save Millions in Data Center Power Costs
- Will East Coast Flood West Coast in Search of Jobs?
- GOOG Founders Could Buy All US Newspapers and Still Have $12bn
- Microsoft in Bay Area Recruiting Blog Sites for AdCenter Ad Network
- Silicon Valley Rocks! Charity Event for Local Schools
- Fishwrap: Changing Media and PR . . . Plus a Great Pep Talk
- Top of my 2008 Watch: Berlin Based Plista . . . and Online Dopplegangers
- The "Experiential Gap" . . . and the Growing Cosmos of Twitter Applications
- FT Anger on AIG Bailout
- Shift Happens . . . A Visit With One of My Favorite PR Companies
Comments (3)
It would be good to get something approaching customer service from JotSpot
Posted: July 15, 2005 10:20 AM
Joe is right to be concerned about such laws as the DMCA, and he's right that such laws should be dealt with proactively - before they are passed.
But innovation in technology always finds a way to leap well ahead of other institutions with results that aren't even anticipated by the creators.
When we did 386BSD, the first X86 open source BSD, we knew that the Intel processor would be the likely winner in the game. But we didn't anticipate the enormous interest in our OS even though the Dr. Dobbs Journal series was popular. When we released it to the public, we expected about 600 to 1000 downloads and planned accordingly. We got 250,000 and mirror sites were setup to handle the load.
We were set up for a writing project to teach kernel internals and a research project to create new modular OS architecture and design learning from the past. We got a movement. And there was no infrastructure, no partnerships, no business setup to handle this.
We had to make it up (unfunded) as we went along, creating new ease-of-use tools, bartering systems for test, handling comprehensive release engineering and QA of apps / tools / compilers / utilities / etc, while still keeping our kernel writing and research projects going and dealing with the same cynical head-in-the sand business attitude (no one wants that stuff - they want Unix / Solaris / VMS so lets just "wait them out") that today doesn't bother to check with DC until *after* laws are passed. :-)
So the more technology changes, the more business stays the same - firmly stuck in the past.
Lynne Greer Jolitz
CTO - ExecProducer / CoolClip Network
Co-creator of 386BSD, the first open source Berkeley Unix for the X86
Posted: July 15, 2005 11:07 AM
Good to know that Joe is old enough to be a veteran! By the time he's 40 he'll be a fossil on your timescale!!
Posted: July 15, 2005 4:34 PM