I attended the Sillicon Valley 4.0 conference earlier this week. Since the venue lacked an open AP, there was no live-blogging. But having chewed on what I heard for a few days, I do have a few things to say.

Although I'm going to take some shots at the premise of the conference, I don't mean to denigrate the efforts of the sponsoring Churchill Club. This was their first time out with a day length event, and it was a credible effort: often entertaining, at times thought provoking, with good schmoozing. If you want a journo take on the affair, try this, though it wasn't as morbid as the spin makes it sound.

The conference title refers to the notion that the Valley has already been through three major versions: 1.0 was semiconductors, 2.0 was personal computers, and 3.0 the Internet. The opening panel featured Les Vadasz, John Sculley and Judy Estrin, each as a representative figure of one of the business cycles. Of course, we know how those stories came out.

But since we're all in the Valley of Despair right now (actually, it's starting to improve), the extended premise of the conference was the search for Version 4.0 to rescue us. Thus, in the afternoon we got a panel of Steve Jurvetson, John Freund, Gerry Purdy, and Curt Carlson to represent (respectively) nano-stuff, biotech, wireless, and (I guess) voice computing and AI as the putative saviors. What a bore. No commonality or engagement between the points of view, and absolutely no evidence or specifics. Purdy even ducked a question from the floor re whether carriers or WiFi-style systems would drive wireless. It's not that these guys are dopes, they are all intelligent investors or futurists. They were asked the wrong question.

It's time for a speech from my Old Fart's soapbox: The problem was the conference had the same plot line as innumerable business and tech press stores: The Grail Quest for the Next Big Thing. While this motif does allow simplication for the sake of selling tickets or newsrags to the hoi polloi, there's one big problem. It doesn't work that way. The Next Big Thing is a narrative we lay on top of the events after they happen, when we make our myths of the FairChildren, Steve and Steve, and kids from Cham-bana who changed the world. Heros, villains, goats, motives, plot points, morals of the story. All a mirage, induced by survivorship bias. The Next Big Thing sneaks up from behind while you're trying to do your work, kicks your ass, walks over you, and either rifles your pockets or drops gold into your hands. If it's gold, they write a story about it one day. The others you never hear about, unless you live here and know them personally

Galahad knew what he was looking for, we don't. Anyone tells you different, you're talking to a liar. I'm willing to tell a few tales on myself to illustrate the point:

Circa 1987-8 (that would be Valley V2.0), I was involved in this thing called HyperCard at Apple. Engineered or managed production of some of the early, large 'stacks' - we'd call them sites now - parts of encyclopedias, the Whole Earth Catalog, clips of music and some early multimedia. Networks there were wheezing, serial-cabled Appletalk, with local zones and no bridges or way to address the outside world. One day we tried running the music stacks off a file server to see what would happen. It sucked. The serial interrupts broke up everything. Soon the powers that be (Jean-Louis Gassée) decided it was all research anyway, and threw us out of engineering into 'advanced technology.'

Where at least we got Internet accounts. A few lights went on. By mid-1991 I was writing some ranting internal memos that we were down the wrong road with 'multimedia publishing' and should be looking at networks. After they were roundly ignored I sanitized one of them and slipped it to Howard Rheingold, then editor of the Whole Earth Review, who published an edited version. I've still got it and it's here for your amusement. Up with nets, down with CDs. Got that right. Forecast 'push' in a way. About everything else is wrong. We're maybe getting the wireless nirvana I talked about in a few years, but the idea of a information market as the driver was totally bogus.

In that year, the soon-to-be Internet was still a government monopoly, though the wonks were already talking about spinning it off. Also that year, I served on the program committee for ACM Hypertext '91 in San Antonio. We hold the distinction of relegating a certain prototype by a Mr. Tim Berners-Lee into the poster and demo track, since (as I recall the discussion), it didn't present much theoretical novelty, and the user interface sucked. Well, it did.

By 1993, the Internet had gone commercial. I left Apple, in part because it still couldn't find a reason to invest in networks or distributed databases. Moved to Kaleida Labs, where we fought all day about whether the platform of the future was going to be interactive TV settops, or PCs on IP networks, but all talking ScriptX of course. During breaks, we played with this cute freeware from NCSA.

By 1994, IBM and Apple had blown up the networking project there, and I was off to run 'future technology' at CompuServe. By the end of 1994, my significant contribution there was to cancel the next generation proprietary client and lead an much-ridiculed band of 'Web Heads' frantically scrambling to incorporate the momentum of HTML content and services into the business. Too late.

Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda. That's what a Next Big Thing is like. Footprints from your ass to the top of your head. I'm not really complaining. It was a fun ride with great people, and the pay was OK, too. But just keep it in mind the next time the Valley Grail Quest gets trotted out by the punditocracy. There will eventually be a Valley 4.0, but the odds of any of the folks up on stage with their sunk investments - or you - calling it in advance aren't very wonderful. Most likely, it will hit rudely from behind, when least expected. So, find something that solves problems for real people, gets you up in the morning, and lets you work with good folks, and dig in. That's the way the Valley actually rejuvenates itself.
9:14:46 PM