Hacker News Reader

Comment by icantthinkofone | Hacker News Reader

In the film industry, you always hear about some other city being the next Hollywood. The problem is, it's an industry, not a city. If you want to make blockbuster movies, the entire area there is built around providing the services to do all that. If you need a special, weird prop, they've got a guy who has two of them or can make you one in an hour.

The same is true in Silicon Valley. You need some special coding or hardware, they've got a whole subdivision of those guys on 24-hour call. No problem.

You don't find that in any other city for those two industries. You wouldn't want to start a wheat operation in San Francisco but cause they don't have the tools sitting in a store down the street with 10 farmers who know how to use it. Go to Kansas, young man.

View on HN

You are wrong. The difference is that with the Tech industry you can reach people without ever meeting them. The internet unites. With movie industry, you need a stunt man in your face, you need actors in your face, light hands in your face, etc. With software? Need a programmer that knows a special tool? He could be in Mars and you can reach him. All you have to do is network, networking can be done via Internet.

If I was wrong it wouldn't be true and Silicon Valley wouldn't exist today.

And it is also the network effect in finding those folks, need someone to make a weird prop or some special effect or certain sound. Someone knows somebody who knows somebody. Until the that knowledge is disassociated with the human social network a place still has value. BTW, linkedin is not that disintermediary.

I have been to detroit, I wanted to live the batman detroit dream. Better to move to Utah, Arizona or New Mexico. High taxes, corruption. The place needs the peace corps.

Agreed. It's the technical knowledge and the institutional web that, until something causes it to weaken, only gets stronger and stronger each year. I lived in NYC and they said these same things for about three years... And now they've stopped saying it for some reason.

This isn't exactly a fair comparison as it compares physical goods with skilled labor. If everyone believed this statement to be true, there'd probably not be a silicon valley as everyone would be working out of NoVa area, since that's where you'd have to go if you wanted internet. The rise of Seattle, multiple locations in California, Austin, and many many other cities in the tech scene proves that silicon valley has no stranglehold over the industry. They are just the loudest, and perhaps the richest :). Concerning property prices, San Francisco has already felt the pain of the mass influx, as is Austin now and to a lesser extent Seattle. I for one would love to see more options pop up. I do see your point, but hope you're wrong

I'm making no comparison to physical goods except the wheat one. Yes, I'd bet you can grow wheat in San Francisco and lots of films are made in places other than Hollywood but my point is you go where the people are and the people for those industries are in Silicon Valley and not Detroit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com