GE recently held a huge conference in San Francisco on how it plans to dominate the "industrial Internet" by building advanced digital tools into their machines, and creating a better digital experience for the people that use them.
GE isn't going to get there by buying up Silicon Valley companies. It's going straight for the talent. In an interview, GE's CEO Jeff Immelt told GigaOM's Om Malik, "We are better off acquiring people than companies."
GE has tons of engineers, but not the right kind, Immelt told Malek:
"We have a lot of people in software — for instance, a thousand people work on software for MR Scanners — but what we don’t have is the system architects who sit at a higher level and use data to craft experiences."
And they have a plan to get them too. More and more entrepreneurs, and software engineers, like the idea of working on something concrete, and that's an opportunity GE definitely provides. Also, GE hopes to attract people interested in solving big problems in areas like healthcare and energy.
It seems like GE's not content just to collect a bit of data or add a few Internet tools, they want to make it a fundamental part of their products. And they're looking for the very best to do it.
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