Thursday, March 10, 2005
Father of "Moore's Law" Declares that Silicon Valley Is No Longer Unique
First the facts from InfoWorld, and then we'll get to my take on this interesting turn of events at the bottom of the posting.
"Though Silicon Valley was once unparalleled as the natural home of high technology startups, things have changed in the nearly 40 years since Moore, along with Robert Noyce and Andy Grove founded Intel. "It's uniqueness is not as great as it was in the beginning. Other areas have picked up on the technology," Moore said of the region. "Now it's spread around to a lot of other places."
"China, for example, is fast rising as a technology player, he said. "We have very formidable competition in the world. I think the impact of China is just beginning to be felt," he said. "China is training 10 times as many engineers. ... Their technology is catching up fairly rapidly. It's a very entrepreneurial society."
"Chief among the challenges ahead for Silicon Valley is the relative weakness of the U.S. public education system, which Moore characterized as a problem for the entire country, and the San Francisco Bay Area's notoriously high cost of living, both which are making it harder to attract top workers. "It's so damned expensive, especially the housing. It's hard to move young people in." The median price paid for a Bay Area home was $534,000 in January, according to real estate research firm DataQuick Information Systems.
"But Moore did express a qualified faith in both the region and the country that had given birth to his company. "Silicon Valley is still a great place to start a company," he said. "I expect the U.S. will still be a successful player, but I don't think it will enjoy the position it's had in the past 20 years."' Source: InfoWorld
Alice Responds: Ok...I have to say that I disagree and agree with what he is saying. First, Silicon Valley is a machine and much more now than ever thanks to the recent dot com boom. There are more VCs with more money ready to flow into more startups than ever before. The pace in which a company can be founded and financed and launched is as fast as Moore's law itself compared to the days when HP and Intel started. That may not always be a good thing, as the boom bust cycle of the dot coms taught all too painfully, but, every entepreneur I have spoke with from outside the US is quick to note that the American work ethic, the lack of vacation time, and the sheer scale in which we scale news business is still amazingly ahead of the pack.
The long term problems are more in terms of costs and doing things faster with a cheaper workforce. This is happening now in Asia, most notable China and India, where call centers and manufacturing are flocking, but outsourcing is not as easy as it looks and doing something cheaper does not always mean innovation. The other big problem is education and the gradual slide in the average American education. But I also feel that the average education was always tuned for the early industrial age and did little to prepare people for the technology age we are all now firmly into. And yet programmer and innovators have always sprung up. Much as I love Moore, I think he's a bit cranky sounding and making the good old days look a bit greener than they actually were. You can train millions of people to prgram, but you need the culture and infrastructure to innovate, and in that area too, I think we are still 100% unique.
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