Can Silicon Valley Survive? [video] | Hacker News Reader

Can Silicon Valley Survive? [video]

techonomy.com

"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." -Mark Twain

I live in Dallas so I may not have a leg to stand on in this discussion, but I don't find any value in these sort of discussions. I guess they are valuable to some who want to always ensure that they don't become the next Detroit, but these discussions rarely turn into something productive.

One of the leading causes to Detroit's failure in the automotive industry is because it could no longer compete with the manufacturing capabilities of car companies abroad. If we want to determine whether Silicon Valley will last, I think we need to ask, what is the competitive advantage of Silicon Valley? And what would it take for SV to lose it's advantage?

Perhaps what SV has which is unique is a disproportionally large tech infusion. Let me elaborate. Many large tech companies reside in SV and the Bay Area including Oracle, Apple, HP, Google and Intel. It could be argued that these companies are so large at this point that they have cultural effect on the surrounding communities. In tech right now, the largest competitive advantage is good engineers because almost everything else has become easy to obtain thanks to the internet. In order to compete with SV, you may need to duplicate the cultural effect that SV created, and that isn't happening anywhere else on the same level right now. Maybe there is hope in Chicago where students K-12 will start learning Computer Science as part of their core curriculum fairly soon.

The font seems to have trouble displaying a lower-case 'a' in Chrome on Windows 7. If I zoom in to zoom level 150%, it's fine, and it's fine in IE11, but not in Chrome. Very difficult to read!

I'm glad it's not just me! I saw the same thing, and yes, it was very distracting.

I think Silicon Valley got its boost from all the big chip makers in the early days, which led to an excess of resources (so you could get stuff at a discount, or get high-tech services at a reduced price as well) an abundance of talent either camping at the gates, leaving companies, or being cast off.

It was those factors that created the microcomputer industry. It wasn’t some planned educational push or government mandate, it was mainly a bunch of individuals finding a inroad to do some cool stuff and building up from that.

Actually Detroit has some opportunity it is a place with lowering costs and a pre-installed big utility/service infrastructure, depending on what resources are available I am sure some creatives will start building some sort of niche there.

A big problem with Detroit is that the local transportation isn't too hot, particularly because the train system is basically non-existent. I think this is because the car companies pushed back against rail development so that people would have to drive everywhere. It's pretty hard for young people to get around right now, at least until Google releases its self driving vehicles.

Everyone in Detroit has a car.

This is nothing more than an advertisement for this conference next year that I have never heard of.

Is "Silicon Valley" really just the VC-driven startup system (as the article implies)? Or is it something bigger?

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