It’s no secret that the tech community has historically reacted with hesitation at the thought of collaborating with the public sector, what with the red tape, bureaucratic processes, lengthy sales cycles and a generally poor standard of implemented technology (remember Healthcare.gov before Marketplace Lite?). Clashes with Uber and Airbnb have created an image of our government as the hard-fisted guardian of the status quo. With this story so dominant in the tech scene, it’s no wonder that we in Silicon Valley have largely avoided working with the government.
The Verge - True story: back when I worked for Engadget it was always my dream to cover a Steve Jobs keynote. I knew how to liveblog, I knew how to do photos for a liveblog. I was capable. But I'm also a walking embodiment of Murphy's Law. Everything that can go wrong with technology, will go wrong in my hands. What if I can't connect to the internet? What if my camera's not working? What if I forget a cable, or an SD card reader? I was too obviously cursed with unreliability to earn a spot at a Stevenote. When Apple unveiled the iPhone, arguably the most important Apple keynote of all time, I was covering a Dell press conference in Las Vegas.
With all those superhero movies taking over the big screen, it’s hard not to want some kind of superpower yourself. If you’re desperate for some superhero action, the way to do it (unless you are a mutant) is by using some manmade technology gadgets that could give you superhuman powers. Let’s face it. You are not going to become Iron Man, nor will you acquire Batman’s cool gadgets, but you can come closer than you think to those superheroes by using the following gadgets.
Microsoft is climbing onto the summer sale and back-to-school bandwagon, and has rolled out a pretty sweet deal for its US buyers. Until August 14, students who purchase the Surface Pro 4 will get an Xbox One free alongside.
Ha, that's like the mob saying "hey were ready to get into tech, come job our organization".
No offense to the mob.
'it’s no wonder that we in Silicon Valley have largely avoided working with the government.'
A huge LOL to this. Its not as if Silicon Valley has no history whatsoever of government co-dependence that spurred innovation /s
Stephen Ezell writes: 'Federal funding of research into computer networking at Stanford was instrumental to the development of networking technologies that Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner ultimately commercialized as Cisco. Funding from the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative played a role in Larry Page and Sergey Brin developing a new algorithm, PageRank, which gave rise to Google. The founders of Genentech and other Bay Area biotech firms relied in part on federal research money to universities. In fact, the Science Coalition's report Sparking Economic Growth 2.0 traces well over a dozen innovative Silicon Valley companies that got their start directly as a result of federally funded research into Silicon Valley area universities such as Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.'
More on the subject:
http://steveblank.com/secre...
At least the author is being even handed in suggesting cooperation between the private and public sectors.
'If the government wants to have a hand in the future of the public, they need us as much as we need them.'
I suppose my point is what the author is suggesting (cooperation) already happened (and its still happening) the myth that Silicon Valley just came to be out of thin air is a farce. The US government for all intensive purposes was one of if not the largest customer and financier aka the sugar daddy of the Valley.