So Long, Silicon Valley
(April 2002, Irish Times)
Renowned pundit and software developer Dave Winer often punctuates his email newletters with information on what music he’s playing as he works. I’m a trusting soul generally, but it’s interesting how often the tune is a propos
– R-E-S-P-E-C-T for Microsoft stories, California Girls for HP, and so on.
Well as I packed my bags to leave Silicon Valley, the radio played “Thanks for the Memories” – and this is not a column in praise of Intel, but a farewell to Silicon Valley.
The omens weren’t good – the day before I got laid off in January, I bought a stock I’d been promising myself for some time. It promptly tanked. If bad luck comes in threes, I wasn’t about to stick around for the final chapter.
In March my family hitched its wagons and headed here to Santa Fe, about 1500 miles and a world of priorities away from Silicon Valley. So – thanks for the memories, Silicon Valley, after over ten great years. When we arrived in 1992 the Valley was coming out of one of its slumps, and none of us knew the wild ride that lay ahead.
When I helped to launch Apple’s Newton, and watched it become the fodder for a thousand cheap shots, I didn’t know it was not the end, but the beginning of the handheld revolution that gave us the Palm, the Treo and soon the Danger hiptop.
With Excite, promoting their online service, we worried about how the company would compete with Yahoo. This ultimately proved to be moot, as Excite merged disastrously with At Home, and each side managed to drag the other down despite exponential growth in Internet traffic and an insatiable desire among US households for the broadband access that At Home delivered.
I was privileged to work with other Valley legends like Larry Ellison, John Sculley, and GPS pioneer Charlie Trimble, and with startups like Paypal and Blue Martini. All the elements that drew me to Silicon Valley are still there
– the marvelous climate, the endless wonder of the Pacific Ocean, the focus on creating the best technology. There’s an all tech, all the time radio station, CNET Radio, widely listened to in the area, that has a daily peak time call-in quiz asking questions like, “who was the originator of Linux” and “name the generations of Intel processors” – great stuff that feeds the sense of being in a special place.
For the past five or six years, although we have good local newspapers, we could read about ourselves in all the national press – Fortune magazine was often wall-to-wall technology and the Wall Street Journal also seemed to cover little else. Other publications such as Forbes, Time and the New York Times, stuffed offices up and down the Valley with journalists who breathlessly reported the intrigues, the triumphs and the lifestyles of the area.
I often wondered what it felt like to be in, say, the auto industry in Detroit, and picking up your weekly Fortune magazine to read about twenty-somethings who were on their second IPO and talking like they ruled the world. It must have seemed like another planet.
And it was. For that brief time the business world seemed to be obsessed with Silicon Valley. Other countries sent earnest delegations to see how they could replicate the region. Academics puzzled on how the Valley could continue to grow seemingly endlessly. Financiers, realtors, publicists, lawyers and other parasites set up shop here to get their piece of the action. The talk was of the “frictionless economy” where it would all go on forever. Well, that all stopped rather abruptly.
Now the carpetbaggers are moving out (thankfully, not too many to Santa Fe), the hastily built offices are sporting “For Lease” signs, the Stanford MBAs – always a lagging indicator of the next hot area – are considering jobs with Proctor and Gamble, Philip Morris and General Motors.
The news bureaux are slimming down. San Francisco no longer worries about becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley and landlords are choosing restaurants, dry cleaners and clothes store tenants over cool Internet startups with their “can’t lose” stock options instead of rent. In summary, Silicon Valley is in danger of becoming normal again. Just a place where very bright people do interesting work in a marvelous environment. Most of them don’t get rich, all of them are happy to have a regular salary and none of them consider the stock options as more important than job stability and a decently balanced life.
It’s been a wild ride indeed. I’m glad to have been a tiny part of it, and I will continue to watch the wild and wacky ideas it generates. I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.
Thanks for the memories.
Afternote: I wrote this in 2002. Obviously, although the sentiments were real, I was completely wrong in 100% of my predictions.
Want to see some more of my Irish Times dispatches?
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