4 ms·

Geneva and Tampere (200k pop each! how many devs do they even have?) and Milan and Calgary are known for tech? Quite frankly that's news to me in each case. Wha

Geneva and Tampere (200k pop each! how many devs do they even have?) and Milan and Calgary are known for tech? Quite frankly that's news to me in each case. What are the biggest tech companies from each of those? After a quick google search for "largest tech company city_name", Milan was the only one to pop up with a familiar name (Accenture).

jacquesm 8y ago
> Geneva and Tampere (200k pop each! how many devs do they even have?) Geneva is home to CERN, if you shoot a random passer by your chances are pretty good that you hit someone that is good in physics, software or both. Tampere is where Nokia had a huge installation. Milan has lots of CAD related companies as well as ABB. Calgary is one of the cities in Canada that have lots of networking tech related companies, and also Rockwell, Unysis and Garmin (and many others besides). Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech.
- uxp100 8y ago
  And of course, the thing it's actually named for. Huge fabless semiconductor companies in sunnyvale/santa clara. And some with fabs elsewhere.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    TSMC has plenty of that, and all of the stepper tech comes from ASML in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. This whole myth that SV is somehow the only tech place on earth worth mentioning is ridiculous.
    - uxp100 8y ago
      Previous post suggested to me that SV was the center of only web technology. I was pointing out it is the birthplace of Intel, AMD, Altera, Xilinx, NVIDIA, etc. And has offices of Samsung, Hynix, Mediatek. Really too many to name.
- shrimpx 8y ago
  > Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech. SV is dominant in web/mobile/cloud/social/productivity/AI/autonomous driving/electric cars/sharing economy and in foundational tech like programming languages, databases, kernels, and networking. This is in large part due to American graduate-level education in tech being vastly superior to anywhere else in the world, both in quality and in having its finger on the industrial and market pulse. (I've experienced high-quality graduate programs in other countries, incl. Germany, France, and Canada, who are just completely out to lunch in terms of what's relevant.) I know I'm making some big claims here but in my experience as a elsewhere-born American graduate student, software engineer, and world traveler, this is pretty much true.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    > web Invented in Europe, ca. 1989. > Mobile Mostly the Nordics > cloud Yes, Amazon is really good at that. Located in... Seattle > social Preceded by many countries we are now left with a handful of dominant players, and fwiw we could miss them and I wouldn't lose a single nights' sleep. But yes, Social is something that SV is dominant in. > productivity Which packages are we referring to here? Productivity is a bit broad to assign to SV in its entirety, or even dominance wise. There are so many players in that space all over the world that I'm not sure that is a credible claim. > AI Yes, probably you are right there. But the University of Waterloo, Canada is where the vast bulk of the current AI wave originated. > autonomous driving Is an offshoot of that AI effort mentioned above. > electric cars True again, and it couldn't happen anywhere else than in California. > sharing economy I would be happy to get rid of all of it. > programming languages, databases, kernels, and networking That's pure rubbish. These have been contributed too all over the world and SV is not currently dominant in any of that.
    - dsajames 8y ago
      Half truths. Who cares if http was invented at cern so many years ago? NOW it's pretty dominant. Mobile? How are those Nordic countries doing? Seems to me it's Google and Apple.
  - mempko 8y ago
- ng12 8y ago
  > Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech. I would generalize that to software engineering, or at least large-scale industrial software engineering. You cant compare what's happening in SV to Geneva.
  - dsajames 8y ago
    Soooo much more than web tech.

jacquesm 8y ago

> Geneva and Tampere (200k pop each! how many devs do they even have?) Geneva is home to CERN, if you shoot a random passer by your chances are pretty good that you hit someone that is good in physics, software or both. Tampere is where Nokia had a huge installation. Milan has lots of CAD related companies as well as ABB. Calgary is one of the cities in Canada that have lots of networking tech related companies, and also Rockwell, Unysis and Garmin (and many others besides). Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech.

uxp100 8y ago
And of course, the thing it's actually named for. Huge fabless semiconductor companies in sunnyvale/santa clara. And some with fabs elsewhere.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  TSMC has plenty of that, and all of the stepper tech comes from ASML in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. This whole myth that SV is somehow the only tech place on earth worth mentioning is ridiculous.
  - uxp100 8y ago
    Previous post suggested to me that SV was the center of only web technology. I was pointing out it is the birthplace of Intel, AMD, Altera, Xilinx, NVIDIA, etc. And has offices of Samsung, Hynix, Mediatek. Really too many to name.
shrimpx 8y ago
> Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech. SV is dominant in web/mobile/cloud/social/productivity/AI/autonomous driving/electric cars/sharing economy and in foundational tech like programming languages, databases, kernels, and networking. This is in large part due to American graduate-level education in tech being vastly superior to anywhere else in the world, both in quality and in having its finger on the industrial and market pulse. (I've experienced high-quality graduate programs in other countries, incl. Germany, France, and Canada, who are just completely out to lunch in terms of what's relevant.) I know I'm making some big claims here but in my experience as a elsewhere-born American graduate student, software engineer, and world traveler, this is pretty much true.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > web Invented in Europe, ca. 1989. > Mobile Mostly the Nordics > cloud Yes, Amazon is really good at that. Located in... Seattle > social Preceded by many countries we are now left with a handful of dominant players, and fwiw we could miss them and I wouldn't lose a single nights' sleep. But yes, Social is something that SV is dominant in. > productivity Which packages are we referring to here? Productivity is a bit broad to assign to SV in its entirety, or even dominance wise. There are so many players in that space all over the world that I'm not sure that is a credible claim. > AI Yes, probably you are right there. But the University of Waterloo, Canada is where the vast bulk of the current AI wave originated. > autonomous driving Is an offshoot of that AI effort mentioned above. > electric cars True again, and it couldn't happen anywhere else than in California. > sharing economy I would be happy to get rid of all of it. > programming languages, databases, kernels, and networking That's pure rubbish. These have been contributed too all over the world and SV is not currently dominant in any of that.
  - dsajames 8y ago
    Half truths. Who cares if http was invented at cern so many years ago? NOW it's pretty dominant. Mobile? How are those Nordic countries doing? Seems to me it's Google and Apple.
- mempko 8y ago
ng12 8y ago
> Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech. I would generalize that to software engineering, or at least large-scale industrial software engineering. You cant compare what's happening in SV to Geneva.
- dsajames 8y ago
  Soooo much more than web tech.