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How Silicon Valley Got That Way -- and Why It Will Continue To Rule
An anonymous reader writes: Lots of places want to be 'the next Silicon Valley.' But the Valley's top historian looks back (even talks to Steve Jobs about his respect for the past!) to explain why SV is unique. While there are threats to continued dominance, she thinks it's just too hard for another region to challenge SV's supremacy.
How Switzerland Got That Way -- and Why It Will Continue To Rule
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Nothing involving active processes, continued development, and people is permanent. Its longevity is always dictated by its continued management and the ability to keep pushing without growing complacent such that disruptive technologies or hungry competitors don't surpass it or make it irrelevant.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Silicon Valley was kick-started by federal dollars.
Remember that you fuckers every time you fire American workers for H1-bs and then accuse them of having entitlement issues. And remember it again assholes when you say shit like "you could be in India" so be thankful for your refrigerator.
The only people with entitlement issues are the SV "entrepreneurs" and VCs.
There's a ton of software companies out there, and the majority of them aren't in Silcon Valley. When I think about the software I use every day, most of it wasn't produced in SV. Linux? Worldwide. Windows? Redmond. Facebook? Don't use it. Google Chrome? Ok, one.
Software is way, way bigger than SV, and has been for a long time. SV is a big player to be sure, but it's not a company, and it doesn't act as one entity. It's a region, and it certainly doesn't rule, or have any dominance.
continue to suck?
And there's LOTS of water nearby. But the way they manage it, it is like having a duffel-bag full of weed and no papers or lighter.
The place where everyone goes to 'disrupt' things has assured us that business will continue as usual.
Ultra expensive, employees can leave for another startup, employees demand 2x their national average wage, employees demand partial ownership, highest taxes in nation, lawsuit friendly, non compete clauses not enforceable.
I can do a startup in Texas without these problems for half the cost and low taxes. I can find qualified workers too and not just self-righteous college graduates with no experience demanding 100k a year too! Before I am labeled anti employee assholes I would like to say a 70k job in Austin gets you a nice home. I pay less in taxes on you too and we both win. Try that with 120k in San Francisco?
What made silicon valley was what Texas or North Dakota is today. Cheap land, cheap employees, friendly government, no one leaving for another startup.
In the 1960s Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey was where it was out. Now the reverse is true.
Economics should be encouraging companies to leave. This whole synergy argument is bullshit
http://saveie6.com/
Just like you will never need more then 640kb of ram! Usually a statement like this is shortly proceeded by it becoming made false :)
Very little of the qualities identified are in any way unique. Lots of places around the world (Waterloo, Canada, for one) have created very similar environments, simply on a smaller scale. Silicon Valley is merely the first and the biggest, and will keep its place with a little bit of effort, or lose it just as easily.
Given what might happen over the next two US election cycles, the next SV might be the European country/countries that finally decide to take California on. It's reaching the point that it's hard to have a balanced living-space in SV and the number of people who don't want to deal with the US, as far as I can tell, is growing as well. If there's any hiccup in the cashflow to the startups, the opportunity will be there to usurp.
Personally, I'd bet on Detroit for future economic ascendance- at least for the U.S. Rent ist dirt cheap and there's a distinct artsy/berlinish vibe to the people rebuilding Detroit right now - lot's of creativity and pragmatism ... For the western hemisphere in total Berlin is a good bet. Abundance of talent and creativity and a digital culture that is one abstraction level away from hardware (which will be built entirely by robots in just a few years from now anyway) plus a culture that emphasises a post-scarcity economy.
On a global perspective we westerners shouldn't delude ourselves. Far-east asia and india and perhaps the arab nations (after the terror has calmed down and the people are clamoring for an age of reason again) is probably where the parties at in 2-3 decades from now. India is the youngest country in the world. We'll all be pensioners when they'll just be warming up. 1.3 billion fairly well educated people in their best years ought to pack some economic and innovation punch.
I expect the valley and bay area to turn into something of a modern day Paris meets Amsterdam - which it basically is already. A tourist attraction and real-estate investment haven for the super-rich.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
and why it will continue to peddle nothing but empty clickbait.
I actually did RTFA. The historical stuff is interesting. The assertion that no place else will ever come close is completely unsupported.
I remember reading excerpts from historical articles about NYC and London in economic texts and how they would never be eclipsed.
1. Both NY and London hit certain sizes and then the close interaction (required according to the author) between peoples cannot happen as well because of the size of the crowd.
2. When the prices of renting get too high, the smartest students can't afford to move there, not unless they go into finance (or can live on H1-B wages)
3. The price of water in California is going to skyrocket. That changes everything about the immediate area.
Tulips in Holland (1500s), Tea from Asia (1600s), Beaver pelts from America (1700s), Watches from Switzerland (1800s), all highy profitable markets not only guranteed to never fail by their salesmen, but ones that failed spectacularly fast when the end did hit.
Try Cambridge, with companies like ARM, Cambridge Silicon Radio/CSR (several billion chips sold) Cambridge University. Plenty of money in London, Europe's financial centre. Plenty of talent around, or attractable due to English being the universal language and European borders being open -- or old colonial ties. Or try Berlin for "frontier living".
... are mentioned here:
http://steveblank.com/2009/04/27/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-part-vi-the-secret-life-of-fred-terman-and-stanford/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Terman
I hear California has some huge R&D tax breaks all the libertarians love.
Wow, that is the ultimate interview achievement. He called Steve on his iPhone and he answered from beyond the grave.
This is precisely why I won't leave California. I will never sign a non-compete contract.
That has nothing inherently to do with being in California. I've never lived much west of the Mississippi and I've never signed or even been asked to sign a non-compete in well over 20 years. While they are legal in my state they are not particularly common.
Personally, I'd bet on Detroit for future economic ascendance- at least for the U.S. Rent ist dirt cheap and there's a distinct artsy/berlinish vibe to the people rebuilding Detroit right now - lot's of creativity and pragmatism
Don't forget that Detroit metro has among the highest density of engineering talent in the country and has for the last 50 years. There is a LOT of technology in the area already and it's not particularly hard to find talent. The biggest problem in Detroit has historically been getting funding for ventures. There is nothing quite like the VC base there is in Silicon Valley. Of course that's true almost everywhere else
US defense industry was big in california from WW2 through the end of the cold war. Lockheed had lots of smart engineers building stealth aircraft at their Skunkworks there. the US space program was the original buyer for CPU's and all kinds of tech that we use today
after the cold war ended these engineers went to work for private industry
Silicon valley has changed throughout history, and one could claim that that is what makes it silicon valley.
Now though, it is dominated by huge corporations (Google, Facebook), that contribute little to the silicon valley-ness of the place.
Combine that with an overwhelming amount of gold diggers, and there's not all that much left of the original uniqueness of the place.
Who can afford to even begin a startup here?
And I haven't touched on the self serving nature of the startups that do com from SV...
As insane as it may sound, Merced CA is the home of a new UC and is slowly - painfully growing into a high tech start-up center.
Google runs Loon and part of its Google X autonomous car stuff there.
Venture Lab, Vault Works, cheap property, cheap housing, constant flow of hungry STEM grads.
Its a 20 minute flight from SV and a peaceful centering ride too.
High speed rail sometime in the future.
Campus doubles in 5 years.
Isn't it basic writing that your IDENTIFY the subject before you start referring to them with pronouns? "The Valley's top historian" is a descriptive statement (and a personal opinion at that), it doesn't substitute for her name.
The real 'secret' of Silly Vally is amounts of equity or options offered, that can make SV million dollar homes and luxury cars affordable. Silly Vally entrepreneurs are smart ones to understand the benefit for them of the profit sharing, while those in midwest are more often a penny counting slam lord types, more interested in mind games and casinos than growing a real business. Go ask for an equity sharing in midwest, - they'll look at you as you are an alien.
There is one reason that Silicon Valley will not survive.
The PC/SJW crowd is targeting high tech. now. I can see eventually a case like Ellen Pao where a bad choice of some San Fransisco jury is going to a company in a case that is not even good enough to be borderline.
At that point several startups and established tech firms are going to realize that it is safer to have their facilities in Topeka or Toledo or Peoria etc than it is in the second liberal armpit of America.
You'll get less antagonistic juries and even when guilty won't see such large judgements.
You don't need to sign a non-compete in California, your employer already has signed one for you!
They've all secretly agreed not to poach! Who needs a non-compete agreement when your employer's competitors have all agreed not to hire you!
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
The article makes no argument to support its assertion that silicon valley will continue be a unique technology center. In fact, the article does make several compelling observations and cites trends that would portend just the opposite--a diaspora of tech development.
The specific SV boom from 1960-1990 was a concatenation of unique events. There is nothing unique to the geography that will keep tech in SV. California has the best combination of weather and recreation in the U.S. (IMO), but that's not going to keep the rest of the world from catching up in the areas that created SV: knowledge workforce, capital, and willingness to take a risk.
Silicon Valley was nowhere in the 60s. Everything has it's rise and fall
Consider what happened around Boston, look at the wreckage of the computer industry there:
Symbolics, Lisp Machine, Prime, Data General, Wang, ComputerVision, and (of course) Digital Equipment Corporation.
For a while, route 128 was the epicenter of the American computer industry. Now, those companies are all dead.
It's coming for you, California! Silicon Graphics, Sun... Gone... HP is already circling the drain. Apple's remarkable boutique computer business can only last so long. The web companies are largely one-trick ponies, just waiting to lame up. (We saw what happened to Twitter's valuation last week...)
I call bullshit on this article.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
NSA nsa Nsa nSa
chant with the world and realize you are screwed yankies
There is this thing called Skype and planes.
Doesn't work, not at scale anyway. The notion that location doesn't matter is a myth. Silicon Valley is what it is precisely because the people that make it what it is are located there. Move them somewhere else and Silicon Valley doesn't exist - not as we know it. Detroit is the automotive capital of the world because of the people and companies that are located there. You cannot skype that into existence. It doesn't work. You have to have the people actually living and working there.
This is precisely why I won't leave California. I will never sign a non-compete contract.
I've never signed (nor being asked to sign) a non-compete in the 20+ years I've been working in the East coast (Florida, specifically). And even if you were asked to sign one, they are rarely enforceable. The one case I know well was completely obliterated in a county court because it would have forced the defendant to take unreasonable daily commute drives to work - meaning 20 miles one way.
Maybe you should have looked after your employees better, and paid them well enough to ensure they'd stick around. Companies that depend on locking in employees with non-competes are bad actors in my view.
In your view?
I don't defend non-compete agreements, but you are seriously mistaken if you think employees can leave (and worse, go after your clientele) because they do not get treated better. I've seen employees leaving with confidential information, and client information (in industries where that is/was illegal) despite getting a very good treatment, benefits, salaries and a decent work culture. These people not only damaged (or try to damage) the company, but by transitivity, they did so against their fellow (ex) co-workers who did nothing against them.
Oooooohhhhhhhhh evil companies bluhr durr durr.
Either it never occurred to you that this is possible, or your have never seen it, or you simply decide to ignore it. Either way, it doesn't help the position you are trying to present.
Avarice, malice and treachery runs on both sides of the fence. It is human nature, and to pretend employees do not act on it is simply stupid.
That people on /. mod you up without even considering the real examples in history of employees damaging companies that treated them well, that is not surprising.
You must be young. 100k highway miles was considered the expected life of a car at least by the late 1950s. Many were scrapped before they wore out due to damage from accidents or abuse, but with regular maintenance cars were expected to run 100k or more. You'd expect to replace the brakes, clutch, water pump, etc. as needed along the way. You have to go back before WW2 and the primitive lubricants available then to get the poor service life that you're talking about. Of course, there were always those who didn't bother with things like oil changes who would see premature failures.
Even as late as the 1980s, cars did not have a 6th digit on the odometer, so you couldn't go 100k miles without rolling over. I'm old enough to remember what cars were like in the 70s, and to have driven 80s cars. It was rare for cars to exceed 100k, rare enough that they didn't bother with the 6th digit on American cars. It was the Japanese cars in the 80s, as I recall, where they started putting that extra digit in, and it actually got used a lot. A mid-80s American car simply wouldn't last that long unless someone was really serious about upkeep and repairs and doing engine rebuilds. I do have a relative with a couple of 60s-era pickups still running, but he replaces the engines every so often and it's his hobby to do constant upkeep on them, but that is not a normal case at all.