Super Competition

By Ramesh Akkineni
from a post on bunnie's blog
Knowledge is cheap. Components are cheap. The knowledege in those books are the Real Deal, and the parts down the street are all there. And within an hours drive north is probably 200 factories that can take any electronics idea and pump them out by the literal boatload…and these are no backward factories. I saw with my own eyes name-brand 1550nm single-mode long-haul fiberoptic transcievers being built and tested out there. Shenzhen is fertile ground. You need to come here to see it to understand it. As a technologist from the US, I tremble in my boots, with terror and excitement–I get to be a part of this! This place has the pregnant feel of the swapfests in Silicon Valley back in the 80’s, when all the big companies were just being founded and starting up…except magnified by 25 years of progress in Moore’s Law and the speed of information flow via the Internet. In this city of 12 million people, most involved in tech or manufacturing, plenty of foreign influence, many learning English, all of them willing to work hard, there has to be a Jobs and Wozniak somewhere, quietly building the next revolution.

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