Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Marc Anderson fools Felix with the delusion

And yet the right people in the right place are worth more now than at any point in history. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, writing in the WSJ on Saturday, complains with good reason:

Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high.
It’s clear that there’s a shortage of good software engineers in the world. But it’s important to understand that Silicon Valley is facing an artificial shortage of good software engineers. There are lots of highly-qualified software engineers from India, Russia, and elsewhere—even Canada—who would love to work in Silicon Valley but can’t, for visa reasons.

Both of these two miss the point. People around the world do software all the time, they deploy it, they make money. The whole system today is based on web standards, the W3C standard group. Yet, perusing the W3C site I cannot even find if they have a headquarters! Facebook wasn't started in Silicon Valley, neither Microsoft. We have software experts around the world who have expertise in Google's Android. Linux still runs the web, but Linux has no home.

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