18 October 2005

Sources and Uses of Russian Technology

My mornings are fairly standard, albeit that crawling out of bed thing gets harder as winter approaches. Sometime between 8 and 8.30 I am sitting at my computer scanning the overnight email and reading the morning news. This is a combination of RSS feeds via the wonderful NetNewsWire and traditional news websites.

It struck me last night that these break down in to two separate groups. The international news I read via RSS feed, including my sports news but with the dishonourable exception of The Deal. Any news that I read on Russia has to be read on the original website.

A comment on this Blog reminded me of Esther Dyson's $10,000 bet that Russia will be the world's leading software developer by 2010. Brilliance in software engineering is a good thing, but if that code is written in isolation then it may not serve a greater good. Web2.0 has the technology world jumping and down with joy, particularly if you are Sergei and Larry. There are deals being done all around the blogosphere. Wikis and Tiddlywikis (my current favourite if I can work out how to make it work for me) will make a significant difference to how we work in the future. If you are not deep in to this then the chances are that you will not be engineering software to change the future.

Offshoring companies like Luxoft (by the way you desperately need to change your ad copy) and Epam Systems probably don't care. I do because if Russia does not address innovation and soon the very bright will go and work elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: , ,

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

and go overseas they should. It's a sin to let talent drink it self to death somewhere in Kamchatka or even in Moscow, for the lack of opportunities.

The thing is...there has been a lot of research done in how to replicate Silicone Valley style communities. The idea is to get the infrastructure (business parks) and the capital (tax incentives for VCs) to create a few millionaire entrepreneurs who'll seed the next generation of startups and the cycle starts to repeat it self.

It's not easy though. It takes time. Menlo Park goes as far back as Thomas Edison which dates the Valley in the triple figures. During that time, countless fortunes have been created and reinvested back into the tech ecosystem.

So, I sympathize with what you are saying. I understand that Russia is trying to make a go of industrial parks to put together some kind of an infrastructure to support its native talent- and like you said, coding doesn't matter without an ecosystem to give it meaning and that takes a few years to naturally develop.

I hope Esther is right in her reasoning and that she's not just guessing, because 2010 is 5 years away, and I can't see many people having the time to make some serious money and return in back into the development community for the new round of software companies - because if anything determines microeconomic competitive advantage - it's that kind of closed loop mechanisms.

I wonder how many millionaires have come out of Yandex and what they're thinking of doing for their second ventures.

18 October 2005

Sources and Uses of Russian Technology

My mornings are fairly standard, albeit that crawling out of bed thing gets harder as winter approaches. Sometime between 8 and 8.30 I am sitting at my computer scanning the overnight email and reading the morning news. This is a combination of RSS feeds via the wonderful NetNewsWire and traditional news websites.

It struck me last night that these break down in to two separate groups. The international news I read via RSS feed, including my sports news but with the dishonourable exception of The Deal. Any news that I read on Russia has to be read on the original website.

A comment on this Blog reminded me of Esther Dyson's $10,000 bet that Russia will be the world's leading software developer by 2010. Brilliance in software engineering is a good thing, but if that code is written in isolation then it may not serve a greater good. Web2.0 has the technology world jumping and down with joy, particularly if you are Sergei and Larry. There are deals being done all around the blogosphere. Wikis and Tiddlywikis (my current favourite if I can work out how to make it work for me) will make a significant difference to how we work in the future. If you are not deep in to this then the chances are that you will not be engineering software to change the future.

Offshoring companies like Luxoft (by the way you desperately need to change your ad copy) and Epam Systems probably don't care. I do because if Russia does not address innovation and soon the very bright will go and work elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: , ,

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

and go overseas they should. It's a sin to let talent drink it self to death somewhere in Kamchatka or even in Moscow, for the lack of opportunities.

The thing is...there has been a lot of research done in how to replicate Silicone Valley style communities. The idea is to get the infrastructure (business parks) and the capital (tax incentives for VCs) to create a few millionaire entrepreneurs who'll seed the next generation of startups and the cycle starts to repeat it self.

It's not easy though. It takes time. Menlo Park goes as far back as Thomas Edison which dates the Valley in the triple figures. During that time, countless fortunes have been created and reinvested back into the tech ecosystem.

So, I sympathize with what you are saying. I understand that Russia is trying to make a go of industrial parks to put together some kind of an infrastructure to support its native talent- and like you said, coding doesn't matter without an ecosystem to give it meaning and that takes a few years to naturally develop.

I hope Esther is right in her reasoning and that she's not just guessing, because 2010 is 5 years away, and I can't see many people having the time to make some serious money and return in back into the development community for the new round of software companies - because if anything determines microeconomic competitive advantage - it's that kind of closed loop mechanisms.

I wonder how many millionaires have come out of Yandex and what they're thinking of doing for their second ventures.