Yep. Though, I think there are excellent start-ups out there, who are innovating for the long term - but those aren't the start-ups that attract the easy money, publicity and hype. At least not at the moment.
Indeed. He's going on about how modern silicon valley, and to be honest much of the rest of the world, is geared around the short term. How start-ups are now light and fluffy, with a focus on making the world worse - by getting their users addicted, in their millions, to menial activities.
I have been thinking about this recently, should the start-ups - which rely heavily on user addiction - be treated as gambling outlets, and therefore be regulated and watched closely? It would at least discourage that form of start-up.
From an non-financial perspective, presumably they are useful for testing the service? Adding experimental features, seeing how they react, not having to worry about up time on their servers. Understanding how the service scales, in case you get any enterprise-style customers. Learning what sort of features are missing etc. Essentially a loss leader to improve the service.
Sony Ericsson isn't that heavily into Symbian anyway. Most of their phones use a Java platform run on top of an OS - Symbian being one of the OSs, but they also use proprietary OSs for the cheaper phones. It was Java that was their focus.
They are just riding the Android and Win7 wave, while the competition isn't too high, and in the long term, I predict they will focus on their own platforms again. There's no other reason why Samasung would be developing Bada for example.