As an Israeli who is working for a silicon company near Intel (where Apple is planning to build their new R&D center), I may shed some light on why silicon and Israel go so well together.
It's all about the culture. Israel is a
very result oriented culture.
Here it's all about the result, not the way you do it, not if you do it right or wrong. If I want you to get me from point A to point B, I don't care how you do it I just want that point B.
Now, this all, like everything in Israel is rooted from the Army. Israel is army based culture. By law, you are drafted to the Army at the age of 18 to serve for 3 years. Everybody is obligated to do it, boy or girl.
This means that almost every israeli is shaped, trained and absorbs the Army culture. The end result is a culture that has Army way of doing things.
The Israeli army, as you might have guessed it already, is a result based organization. It is given a command to execute and it does not matter how the task was accomplished as long as the result was accomplished. This sometimes forces you to thing of creative ways to get that result.
Now, when all of those commanders and soldiers go out of the army, they get some education and start startups or join existent companies. And guess how they run those companies, that's right, they run it the only way they know how to run things. The way they were taught to run things in the army.
So now you have a result oriented company, where you set a goal and the goal it reached with the way not considered important. You are expected to do everything you can think of to get that goal, even if it is a totally crazy idea no one attempted yet.
This is where it gets back to silicone.
With silicone, the way is not as important as the result. It's a black box, you give it an input and expect a preknown output. What it does inside, you don't care. This is where we shine, we know how to make things work and we know how to do it fast. But the way we do it is not the most elegant way, we find the most "innovative" or "crazy" ways to get to point B. We want that point B and that is all that is matter.
Taking the company where I work as an example, somethings we set goals we can't accomplish. Somehow we always find a crazy way to do it in time. It's not the best way to do it, but we get that result and it works.
And guess what, we type out and we sell well. And with silicone, after a year the product gets old and thrown away to be replaced with a new product which had its goal set even higher.
This is the point with silicone, it is a result based product. There is no user experience or behavior. It's all about the result.
Hope you found this interesting
