The bubble exists, but it's ludicrous to believe that SV startups don't have profound effects outside it. What % of people use Google, or Facebook, or Android/iOS every day in the west?
Clearly the products have had a profound impact on culture, but I think the impact would have been the same if they had been developed by Exxon or Halliburton.
As far as the cultural impact of the companies themselves, I think it's been modest at best.
But Exxon or Halliburton couldn't have developed these products. They wouldn't even try and fail to develop these kinds of products.
I believe the question is: "Do the cultural values of a company like Google impact the values (or culture) of their customers through their use of Google's products?"
I would argue that no, they do not. People want to find out where they can buy the cheapest dog food or recipes for something they need to cook. For sure, Google's may present articles that they might not otherwise see, but that's as far as I believe this goes; this other content need not be consistent with Google's values (very often it isn't). Ditto with GMail, I wouldn't think the culture of Google, as expressed through GMail, will make much of an impact on their customers at large.
None of these were SV startups with all the stereotypes that accrue to them. It's true that it's harder for big companies to innovate, but you can't say, "Only SV startups build products that change the world, ergo SV startups change world culture"
Parents staring at their phones instead of paying attention to kids.
Social networks and their impacts on relationships. Movies these days are unrealistic these days because so much important dialogue happens via WhatsApp, text messages and Facebook Messenger, etc.
Guess who will not be driving their own vehicles in 10 or 20 years? Consumers.
Obviously not, or people wouldn't be spending hundreds of extra dollars to abandon their generic cheap Nokias in favor of Android and iOS.
That Android and iOS won via some kind of accident of history is a fairly extraordinary claim, and requires some kind of actual evidence.
What's relevant is that most consumers do not evaluate software platforms from technical and system properties. They seek mobile devices for their end use, and will inevitably steer towards what already has large units stocked, what is advertised and what is recommended via word-of-mouth which will usually create reinforcing loops from consumer impressions caused by the former two. That is to say, the mobile OSes are substitutable goods. Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.
For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance. If it weren't Google, it could have been Altavista or something else. If it weren't Facebook, it could have been MySpace, Friendster or something else. Especially social networks are by definition something that critically depend on Metcalfe's law. Mobile platforms as well, to an extent (largely because apps that people want will converge to them). People do not care that they use Facebook or iOS, they want access to networks of contacts and to communicate with them through a consistent mechanism.
As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.
> Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.
But iOS and Android won by providing superior messaging/browsing/productivity/entertainment, that's the entire point. Nobody is arguing that the kernel in iOS or Android is superior to QNX or Symbian (I have no idea myself, having never looked at the system level of any of those platforms), but rather that iOS and Android provided superior experiences, and that's why they won.
And in a lot of ways, it's the SV culture and its focus on consumer preferences (often mocked as childish and unserious -- "yet another cat photo sharing app") that made it possible for those two platforms to destroy the competition. It turns out consumers really do care if Instagram or Angry Birds is possible or available.
> For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance.
I have no idea where you get so much confidence that alternative OS platforms would have evolved "just the same" -- mobile platforms were a stagnant morass before iOS and (very shortly after) Android came around.
> As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.
"Actual technological properties" here meaning apparently whatever you think is important, and not what actual consumers think is important. User experience is technology. Apple and Google are better at it than Nokia or RIM.
I was making the point that their influence on culture and society is limited, and using Nokia as an analogy. Nokia was Finnish, yet this didn't have any perceptible impact on its hundreds millions of users. None of them started going to sauna, spontaneously developed cross-country skiing skills or realized that having a summer cottage on a lake is holy grail of life.
And yes, smartphones do have ways in which they can influence behaviour to a larger extent than feature phones, but those too shaped the nature of mobile phone interactions for whole generations.
And most (global) end users are non the wiser that there is a place called Silicon Valley where these devices are designed, just like many people thought Nokia might be Japanese - but didn't know for certain.
SV companies influence consumers' lives, sure; but not really how post-fordist capitalism works.