★ “The End of Silicon Valley”

Gizmodo:

Hugely ambitious hardware startups are not launching out of Palo Alto or Menlo Park garages anymore these days. Nor will they ever again. Manufacturing projects are now typically so research and labor intensive that they are beyond the purview of college students. Today, if you want to start up a hardware business, you do it in China.

There are still startups in Silly Valley, of course. The entrepreneurs of yesteryear grew into American Colossi, and ushered in successive generations looking to make their fortunes too, just as surely as Autumn follows Summer. August marked a changing of that guard.

What has happened in Silicon Valley is what has happened to America at large. The knowledge worker has replaced the factory worker. Your gadget may be designed in California, but it almost certainly will never be made there, again. We’re now in the era of the dorm room start up.

I tried to start a company that required we create hardware using off the shelf video recording equipment and sell this to broadcasters for little profit. The moment you mentioned hardware even if it was a Linux MiniPC with a Logitech Camera and Sprint EVDO Card, any investor would close his mind and say that a hardware business is too risky.

Venture capitalists would rather fund a flash based farming game than change the world. We’re in a very differnet time now and I feel sorry for any Stanford student that wants to revolutionize computing with hardware and not software.