In my last post I lamented the fact that it sometimes seems that fewer tech companies have a clever bit and that it seems it is more and more just about applying some known tricks to existing industries while driving software’s mission to eat the world forward. And that maybe this is just the way things go, just like how you used to be able to build a steam engine to build a factory, but later you could just buy a steam engine, you don’t need to be really good at tech anymore to build a tech company. When all companies are tech, none of them are.
But I think there’s more to where we are in our economic development. It occurred to me that historically economic progress has been equal measures of clever bits and gold rushes. The archetypal gold rush is probably the California, well, eh, gold rush. Gold is discovered and it doesn’t matter who is more clever or better at gold panning, what matters is who gets there first and who gets to stake a claim first.
Continue reading the Clever Bit and the Gold Rush
