The Valley of My Dreams: Why Silicon Valley Left Boston’s Route 128 In The Dust | Hacker News Reader

The Valley of My Dreams: Why Silicon Valley Left Boston’s Route 128 In The Dust

techcrunch.com

12 pointswave10 comments

How did the author completely leave out the difference in employment laws. California: you're free to go work for anyone you want. Mass.: you're free to work for anyone, except our competitors or anyone we think might be a competitor, read your contract dummy.

If you work in a specific field, would you really want to be in the state that enforces clauses in work contracts that restricts your mobility. Or the one that sees work as every man has a right to eat. Most likely, the people looking to hire you are your employers rival.

Does anyone really care about non-competes? Spend a winter in the Boston area and you'll find a simpler reason that people prefer the valley. I doubt that life in New England has ever been described as "easy". Given a choice between two otherwise equivalent locations, climate has a huge impact. Imagine the same decision when the easier climate is already seen as the better choice.

it wasn’t so long ago that Silicon Valley was considered a poor cousin of Boston’s tech center

This was never true. It's true that the Valley has pulled further ahead of Route 128, but it was always the leader.

Growing up in MA as a DEC child, I'll admit my perspective is biased... but when I grew up when DEC was the #2 computer company in the world. And they were far from the only Route 128 powerhouse. I'm not saying the Valley doesn't have its own powerful history, but think about this: In its heyday, Route 128 was so big that, decades later, the rubble from what is left is still the #2 tech center in the US and the world.

No question, but was it ever really startup-heavy?

Well, back in the day DEC was an MIT startup, wasn't it? And these days there are a lot of ex-DEC, ex-Data General, etc. startups. That being said, I guess my upbringing is coming through - I care more about tech-heavy than startup-heavy.

What's different now is that there are plenty of people in MA (like MassTLC) that are now actively trying to turn things in a better direction (as opposed to the 80s and 90s complacency). I'm hopeful something good will come out of that (even if it ends up being as small as catching up to California on non-competes).

This post shallowly re-iterates "Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" (1994 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SAXREG.html), while praising the Valley's success.

There's no snow to shovel in Silicon Valley. Does that matter? Hell, yeah.

128 benefited mightily from Tip O'Neill when he was speaker of the house. Much of this coincided with the Reagan defense build-up. O'Neill made sure his state got more than its share of those dollars.

This also held true, to a lesser extent, for the late Ted Kennedy. But now that Tip and Ted are both gone the 128 area has had to compete on its own. Hence Si valley's growing lead.

To some extent it's a matter of following the money.

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