[kerryiob]

I think the points made are good.

Modern efficiencies have eliminated a lot of jobs. Fact. No point in arguing about whether it's good or bad. It just is. So don't waste time trying to defend Apple or Google. They are just successful in their time. Good for them.

Consider though, that many of us who are fortunate enough to be working in the information tech / startup area, are focusing most of our efforts of creating products consumers don't even know they want or need yet, but we hope they find super cool. Hopefully the product gives us enough users to figure out how to make money off ads or something. Cool, fine.

I have to agree that it's a shame that there isn't more momentum behind figuring out how to solve problems that people already have. Figuring out problems that would benefit the vast majority of people who don't work in information technology, who just so happen to be finding it harder to find good jobs because of information technology.

[pron]

I don't think you must necessarily "solve problems that people already have", nor that startups don't do that. I think the article is just a call for startup founders and investors to think first about how meaningful their product is.

But it's not that they don't do that already. Many know damn well that their product, though very cool, has little "true" significance, and they do it anyways. Why? Some of the reasons are mentioned in the article. The startup economy pushes founders towards products that could reap quick exits, so many startups just try to solve smaller and smaller problems. It's not that they're not real – they're just very small. Also, in most cases, these are the only problems a small company has the resources to tackle. This economy, in turn, makes it socially acceptable, and even respectable, to address all of those minor, "meaningless", issues.

There's no one to blame – it's just the market (said with some irony). If we must blame someone, though, I think it's the big companies. Instead of putting a lot of money into research (and only they have the resources to solve the big problems), they prefer – because it's much cheaper – to wait for a startup to successfully solve a minor problem, and then acquire it. Those acquisitions make the prospects of founding a startup to solves a minor pain-point less risky, and so more people do it.