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In fact, Zuckerberg said if he had to do it again, he would stay in Boston...
and I quote...
"You don’t have to move out here to do this. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.”"
The difference is that SV created this stuff, other people copy them when they become mainstream. It's way easier to 'copy' things but much, much harder to 'invent' them. Not that there aren't smart people in Russia, but there is much bigger chance of the next technology revolutions that can touch the world to come from the Bay as opposed to Moscow. Things can and do change over time but that's certainly the case today.
I think SV more "improves" on existing ideas and technology. It invents and creates plenty as well but Google wasn't the first search engine, I pods weren't the first MP3 players, and Facebook wasn't the first social media site.
Moscow in function is more like NYC, DC, LA, and SF combined, of the 2nd largest country in the world...Everything for the entire country is centered there.
So is Moscow more important to the world than NYC which doesn't have everything rolled in one?
Last edited by johnathanc; 10-22-2013 at 12:45 PM..
I think SV more "improves" on existing ideas and technology. It invents and creates plenty as well but Google wasn't the first search engine, I pods weren't the first MP3 players, and Facebook wasn't the first social media site.
SV has a combination of things going on--it certainly has a massive consumer facing side to it, but it also has, due to very strong research universities and national laboratories, also has a lot of people doing groundbreaking research. Unfortunately, that's not what most people think or care about when they think of tech in the Bay Area, but rather the social or mobile tchotchkes that get pumped out rather than all the innovations and research that made all of that possible in the first place.
Hard to tell. The biggest problem is the black hole of military spending on math, science and technology. The other is the Russian Academy of Science's pretty good tolerance for research into "pure" science and math whose practical applications might be still ages away and the extent to which those will be beneficial.
Do you think Moscow has a better collection of science/technology professionals, more funding sources, more appetite for new age ideas, more successful 'global' companies, and better educational institutions than the Bay? To the detriment of other countries, many of the best tech people around world gravitate to the Bay area. Sergey Brin is originally from Moscow. Could one say the same about talented people gravitating to Moscow? This makes a big difference.
Last edited by johnathanc; 10-22-2013 at 12:58 PM..
I think SV more "improves" on existing ideas and technology. It invents and creates plenty as well but Google wasn't the first search engine, I pods weren't the first MP3 players, and Facebook wasn't the first social media site.
This may be true but to step up to the next level in terms of funding & talent many people, ideas and companies still move to the Bay.
Last edited by johnathanc; 10-22-2013 at 01:12 PM..
Do you think Moscow has a better collection of science/technology professionals, more funding sources, more appetite for new age ideas, more successful 'global' companies, and better educational institutions than the Bay? To the detriment of other countries, many of the best tech people around world gravitate to the Bay area. Sergey Brin is originally from Moscow. Could one say the same about talented people gravitating to Moscow? This makes a big difference.
Again, it's hard to tell because there is little transparency for these things in Moscow and the giant defense and space sectors in the city are not going to be patenting much of what they're doing, nor will it invite much in outside funding sources (so, those sectors won't have "more" funding sources as the Russian government). It will have a lot of science/technology professionals. One thing Moscow and its educational institutions seems to produce in spades is talented professionals--it's an unfortunate thing that the US being much wealthier and more populous than Russia seems to rely so much on importing talent rather than fixing its primary and secondary education systems to produce a wealth of native-grown talent more proportionate to its wealth and size. There needs to be a baseline of calculus, linear algebra, introductory computer programming, and the applications of the former three in courses for all the science fields for all US university students, if not high school students, but as things currently stand, I can't imagine that being possible for a very long time.
When it comes to universities, Moscow (and Russia in general) does create an outsized number of science and technological professionals. However, its system of having their students initially at the universities but then doing their research at other institutions, usually within the Russian Academy of Sciences, doesn't work well with the methodology of a lot of school ranking systems as that research and those papers are not counted as part of the schools. It's why you have schools like phystech and moscow state constantly ranking so absurdly well in university stems competitions (you can look through results like this or this going back several years and it's absurd how the US ranks given its advantages of wealth and population--and then you find that many of the US students who place in it are immigrants or first-generation Americans--there is something seriously screwed up with our primary and secondary education), but then somehow not having the commensurate university rankings. Then again, the kleptocracy's recent proposal for "reforms" to the Russian Academy of Sciences where it is no longer a self-managed and run institution might change all of this severely in the coming years.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 10-22-2013 at 03:45 PM..
So is Moscow more important to the world than NYC which doesn't have everything rolled in one?
NYC is a major player in pretty much every sector. If it's not the first, then it's going to be at least top three.
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