A friend of mine worked at a productive technology company that was private. When sales slumped in a recession, the owner turned technical personnel on to creating future products, and turned them to servicing products when the economy was strong. The company became public and the cycle of stability was reversed: laying off people in slumps and hiring people in booms.
If the investment community had more stomach for the power of preparing and the 3-year timeline of development, we might do networking and have more meetings in bust times. We could talk less about the plight of the moment and more about the future in these times; or maybe we do.
Stability for Silicon Valley should be wrapped up in people being available for new projects, people learning deeply about new opportunities, and people taking time to regenerate their tool sets. The lectures, demos and schmoozes are central.
[Editor’s Note: This commentary is part of a series in response to a question we’ve posed to technology leaders: “What three things can San Francisco and Silicon Valley companies, entrepreneurs, and VCs do to foster a more stable environment for innovation in IT, life sciences, and energy, and become less wedded to cycles of boom and bust?”]
Author: Ted Selker
Dr. Ted Selker is Associate director of mobility research at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley and a visiting scholar at Stanford computer science department. He is well known as a creator and testor of new scenarios for working with computing systems. Ted spent ten years as an associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory where he created the Context Aware Computing group, co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and directed a CI/IDI: kitchen of the future/ product design of the future project. His work is noted for creating demonstrations of a world in which intentions are recognized and respected in complex domains, such as kitchens, cars, on phones and in email. Ted’s work takes the form of prototyping concept products supported by cognitive science research.
His successes at targeted product creation and enhancement earned him the role of IBM Fellow and director of User Systems Ergonomics Research. He has served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, taught at Hampshire, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Brown Universities and worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs.
Ted's innovation has been responsible for profitable and award winning products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. For example, his design of the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device is used in many notebook computers, his visualizations have made impacts ranging from improving the performance of the PowerPC to usability OS/2 Thinkpad setup to Google maps, his adaptive help system has been the basis of products as well. Ted’s work has resulted in numerous awards, patents, and papers and has often been featured in the press. Ted was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50 in 2004, the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology in 2006 and the Telluride Tech fest award in 2008.
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