Esther Dyson's bet "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect."
The Computer History Museum gets $10,000 if she loses, I guess they should start planning an exhibit on old Russian computer technology.
But to be less smug for a moment why anyone would think this is beyond me. While the Russians did achieve significant technological advances in the 20th century, and implemented an impressive education system with regard to mathematics and computer science there are so many other factors which play into this. Namely Russia obtaining a score of 2.7/10 for corruption in 2002 from the Corruption Perceptions Index and sliding down to 2.1/10 in the most recent ranking putting them in 158th place. Further they are ranked 143rd on the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom. India with 87th on corruption and 124th on economic freedom, not great, has plenty of English speakers and a more impressive computer science educational infrastructure, as well as being cheaper. The stories of people dying in Russian prisons after resisting corrupt government shakedowns are just horrific and I am not aware of any Indian equivalent. But I suppose if you invest there as she does, you need to talk it up.
Many Russian programmers are algorithmically brilliant. New compression algorithms in the last few years are largely Russian. A Russian guy figured out a couple of years back that using two pivots instead of one in quicksort reduced the number of swaps by 20%, which improvement is now in JDK 7. Quicksort! He found a jewel of performance improvement hiding in the world's best-known optimal algorithm, a jewel nobody had noticed since 1961. Russians routinely win on TopCoder.
It turns out that great software developers are not enough to be the world leader in software development. But it's easy to imagine why someone might think they could be, especially by 2012.
This is very different from software development, which involves a hugely broad diversity of skillsets—only one of which is programming—and the ability to have them all work together without clawing each other's eyes out. Project management, technical writing, graphic design, operations, support, quality assurance all must be cohesively brought to bear in order to claim leadership in software development.
It's a stronger bet than it first sounds, although probably not in the way the author intended. Russia doesn't actually have to be the world leader in software development, they just have to be referred to as such by a news organization. Considering the linkbait trends in modern journalism, the following headline wouldn't surprise me, regardless of what the ground truth is: "Russia: The World's New Leader in Software Development?"
These bets are adjudicated by humans, not computers doing a string matching algorithm. If that article's headline was just a lead up to an answer of "No, not even close" or was even a reference to the bet itself followed by "no, not even close", I don't think anyone is going to argue that as a win. It has to be serious, and barring catastrophe at this point, that's not going to happen. "World leaders in botnet development" won't cut it, either.
Keep in mind that in 2002, Russia seemed to be hand-in-hand with India when it came to outsourcing software dev. It might be a weak bet now, but was stronger when it was made. Wrong, but still stronger.
http://www.longbets.org/5
The Computer History Museum gets $10,000 if she loses, I guess they should start planning an exhibit on old Russian computer technology.
But to be less smug for a moment why anyone would think this is beyond me. While the Russians did achieve significant technological advances in the 20th century, and implemented an impressive education system with regard to mathematics and computer science there are so many other factors which play into this. Namely Russia obtaining a score of 2.7/10 for corruption in 2002 from the Corruption Perceptions Index and sliding down to 2.1/10 in the most recent ranking putting them in 158th place. Further they are ranked 143rd on the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom. India with 87th on corruption and 124th on economic freedom, not great, has plenty of English speakers and a more impressive computer science educational infrastructure, as well as being cheaper. The stories of people dying in Russian prisons after resisting corrupt government shakedowns are just horrific and I am not aware of any Indian equivalent. But I suppose if you invest there as she does, you need to talk it up.