Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, argues in this article that it is alpha geeks not venture capital backed start-ups that lead key tchnology innovations. And they do it not for money but for the fascination of it.
‘Forget Silicon Valley. Traditional wisdom is that it represents the model for American innovation: a hotbed of young entrepreneurs with easy access to capital from a large pool of savvy investors.
Think again: The World Wide Web was started by Englishman Tim Berners-Lee because he was frustrated with how hard it was to share information at CERN, the huge physics lab in Switzerland where he worked. Linux was developed by a Finnish college student who wrote the operating system “just for fun” and is only one example of thousands of open-source software projects begun around the world by people who were writing software to “scratch their own itch” and giving it away for free. Even the personal computer revolution, which took root in Silicon Valley, began with a bunch of hobbyists at the Homebrew Computer Club.’
His conclusion – ‘So don’t follow the money. Follow the excitement. The people inventing the future are doing so just because it’s fun.’
Paul Sloane
Whilst I agree with the proposition about Alpha Geeks, saying that Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux “operating system” is a stretch too far; he wrote the kernel for the GNU o/s which was led by Richard Stallman who is a true Alpha Geek and should be credited with the hard work.