2011 may mark the beginning of a golden era for entrepreneurs #startups

A post from from VentureBeat by Steve Blank has the whole story. Here is a part:

(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. A longer version of this story originally appeared on his blog.)
As we wrap up 2010, things might seem bleak. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including outsourcing the manufacture of America’s physical goods. The pundits say the American dream is dead and this next decade will see the further decline and fall of the West and in particular of the United States.
Personally, I think there’s a chance that the common wisdom is very, very wrong – and that the second decade of the 21st century may turn out to be the West’s – and in particular the United States’ – finest hour.
I believe that we will look back at this decade as the beginning of an economic revolution as important as the scientific revolution in the 16th century and the industrial revolution in the 18th century. We’re standing at the beginning of the entrepreneurial revolution.
This doesn’t mean just more technology stuff, though we’ll get that. This is a revolution that will permanently reshape business as we know it and, more importantly, change the quality of life across the entire planet for all who come after us.
You see, it’s only in the last few years that we’ve come to appreciate that past startups were constrained by:

• long technology development cycles (how long it takes from idea to product),
• the high cost of getting to first customers (how many dollars to build the product),
• the structure of the venture capital industry (a limited number of VC firms each needing to invest millions per startups),
• the expertise about how to build startups  (clustered in specific regions like Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, etc.),
• the failure rate of new ventures (startups had no formal rules and were a hit or miss proposition),
• the slow adoption rate of new technologies by the government and large companies.

What’s happening now is something more profound than a change in technology. What’s happening is that all the things that have been limits to startups and innovation are being removed.  At once.  Starting now.
Compressing the Product Development Cycle
In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. This meant building every possible feature the founding team envisioned into a monolithic “release” of the product.
Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features.  The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. The effort that went into making all those unused features was wasted.
Today startups have begun to build products differently.  Instead of building the maximum number of features, they look to deliver a minimum feature set in the shortest period of time.  This lets them deliver a first version of the product to customers in a fraction on the time.
For products that are simply “bits” delivered over the web, a first product can be shipped in weeks rather than years.