Bill Gates recently sat down for an interview with Rolling Stone, and was surprisingly candid on a number of topics. Aside from talking about his religious views, he also discussed the state of Silicon Valley.
“Innovation in California is at its absolute peak right now," he said. "Sure, half of the companies are silly, and you know two-thirds of them are going to go bankrupt, but the dozen or so ideas that emerge out of that are going to be really important."
As TechCrunch points out, this is a contrasting view to the recent NY Times article that talks about the divide between young people who work on apps, and the older generation that works on the technology that powers those apps. “Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?” wrote journalist Yiren Leu.
The worry here is that not enough young people are learning the "unsexy" part of technology, the hardware, and this could slow down growth in the future since a majority of developers are concentrating on apps.
Maybe they'll think about hardware once they go bankrupt, as Gates says.
[via Rolling Stone]
