8 ms·

The end of the Silicon Valley dream

76 points by Veen 3y ago

Veen 3y ago
http://archive.today/exo4z http://archive.today/exo4z
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products. That sounds familiar…
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
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  - saagarjha 3y ago
    They called it "evil racism" because that's exactly what it is. Your comment is, quite honestly, appalling–integrating minorities into cities is not "politically motivated ethnic cleansing" by any stretch of the imagination.
  - Taniwha 3y ago
    But until relatively recently San Franciso was SV adjacent, not really part of it, more like the grown up cousin up the road where the traditional bankers lived. San Jose has always been the big city in Silicon Valley
    - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
      This is true, those are not the same issues. My understanding is that the center of gravity of the tech scene has moved from Palo Alto and Mountain View to SF in recent years.
- bartread 3y ago
  It wasn't just this though. Japanese (and later other far eastern countries') cost of labour was far lower, so they could build a better product at a lower price point than American manufacturers. That's not to say that lack of focus on quality and overly-aggressive cost-cutting by Ford and others wasn't a problem - it absolutely was - but the article is substantially oversimplifying the situation. I haven't yet come to a conclusion as to whether that's forgivable in its pursuit of making a bigger point: The Spectator does have a tendency towards superficially high-minded but ultimately ineffectual chatter (which at least fits with its name).
  - DebtDeflation 3y ago
    The period from 1973-1983 was known as the "Malaise Era" for US Automakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_era The issue wasn't mainly labor costs, it was a combination of new emissions regulations and rising gas prices along with US Automakers refusal to adopt fuel injection instead doggedly clinging to ever more complicated iterations of the carburetor (the computer controlled carburetors of the early 1980s with their rats nest of wires and vacuum hoses reached peak Rube Goldberg status). Meanwhile, Bosch introduced fuel injection in 1973 and within a couple of years FI was standard on most European and Japanese cars; US automakers waited a decade to adopt it en masse.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Aviation is even more doggedly clinging. You can still buy brand new airplanes with carburetors. The industry is being dragged kicking and screaming into the FI era, and we're also starting to see electronic ignition and even FADEC systems emerging, mostly in the Experimental category.
  - hodgesrm 3y ago
    > The Spectator does have a tendency towards superficially high-minded but ultimately ineffectual chatter (which at least fits with its name). The article draws rather thinly supported conclusions about SV from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Yes, the bank failed but so did others like First Republic, and for similar reasons: interest rates went up and left them holding low-interest bonds that undermined their balance sheets. This is plain old bad management. The Fed response is similarly explainable by fear of contagion. It would have been a stronger argument if the Spectotor pointed out that many large VC-funded firms look like pyramid schemes. Wework and Uber are two obvious examples, along with numerous recent database IPOs--firms that still have no clear route to profitability. Not only that, prominent VC firms seemed to double down on the strategy, as evidenced by A16Z funding Adam Neumann (again) after Wework. [0] [0] https://a16z.com/2022/08/15/investing-in-flow/ https://a16z.com/2022/08/15/investing-in-flow/ Edit: typo
- VHRanger 3y ago
  Detroit's decline is a product of two main factors: 1. Protectionism 2. Recalcitrant unions Protectionism from the tariffs like the Chicken Tax made the US auto industry easily profitable for decades. This meant the industry didn't evolve like the japanese/korean/european counterparts. They could profit even with substandard cars. Unions aren't necessarily bad, on their own. Arguably, the USA needs more unions right now. But they can worsen problems of inefficiency by reducing the adaptability of the org.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    I'd go so far as to say, that recalcitrant unions are more of a symptom of protectionism than a separate thing.
  - xg15 3y ago
    I think a good counter example is the pivot of the Ruhr area from a mining and heavy industries hub to an economy centered on tech and services. It happened despite strong union presence in the old sectors. I think one of the deciding factors was a strong social safety net and an active strategy of the state to bring over the employees into the new sectors and don't just leave them stranded with obsolete skills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr#Postwar_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr#Postwar_period https://www.ruhr-guide.de/freizeit/industriekultur/das-ruhrgebiet-die-entwicklung-und-der-strukturwandel/21960,0,0.html https://www.ruhr-guide.de/freizeit/industriekultur/das-ruhrg... (Couldn't find a good article in english unfortunately)
  - nradov 3y ago
    Detroit's decline had as much to do with shitty product designs as with protectionism and unions. It wasn't union members who designed the Ford Pinto or Oldsmobile diesel engines.
    - VHRanger 3y ago
      Those designs are the result of the lack of competitive pressure coming from the fact that the Detroit automakers effectively had the US market captured.
- threeseed 3y ago
  Manufacturing is always going to chase places with the cheapest wages and the laxest of regulations. US didn't squander anything. They just made a choice that the health and wellbeing of workers are important. Just like China has been making which is why many types of manufacturing are moving to South East Asia and India.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Except American automakers designed shit cars that no one wanted. By the time they had fixed their designs they had acquired a reputation for poor performance cars that break down quickly that sticks with them to this day. American automakers quickly moved production to Mexico, but that wasn't enough to save them from their own shitty designs.
sneak 3y ago
> Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better. This is a rewriting of history. SV started (in the 1950s!) as an outgrowth of the military industrial complex, making tech hardware for DoD radars and missiles. The entrepreneurial, consumer-facing, "change the world" stuff happened afterward.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  Indeed. The rush to replace WWII-era vacuum tubes with solid state silicon was driven by the need to get US bombers and then missiles on target, and stop the Russians doing the same. For example, Fairchild Semiconductor (Santa Clara) was originally part of a (non-SV: Delaware) optics company that made spy satellite cameras. The semiconductor division's first product in 1957 was a transistor used in the B70 bomber computer and the Minuteman ICBM and it cost over $1600 a unit in today's money.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I know you are correct, but if Silicon Valley can have more than one "era", I think many people now regard the one that began with the Homebrew Computer Club as being the more significant one at least for modern times.
LatteLazy 3y ago
> Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products. Alternatively, they were pushed to such thin margins by competition that they stopped innovating because anything that didn't show RoI by quarter's end was not permitted. You can see the same thing happening with Airplanes (Boeing etc),
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  My understanding of history was that American car brands lowered the quality of their cars and/or could not keep up with quality of Japanese car brands. I am also not sure about the claim that Boeing’s competitors’ low profit margins (Airbus?) caused it to sacrifice quality. Why would we exclude the possibility of Boeing (and McDonnel Douglas) execs wanting to cash out by temporarily boosting their stock price (temporarily being on the order of ~10 to 20 years before their changes could be noted to have an effect on the product).
- moritz 3y ago
  I highly recommend reading this article [1] re: Boeing. It's the ultimate parable of late-state technocapitalism; and Airbus has really nothing to do with it. [1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...
threeseed 3y ago
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- Tanjreeve 3y ago
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  - lemetr0l 3y ago
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  - hef19898 3y ago
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  - defrost 3y ago
    Heh. For any not familiar with The Spectator it's a UK paper that's been a literal UK Conservative Party mouthpiece since its first issue in 1828. Editors have frequently held significant political positions, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gilmour,_Baron_Gilmour_of_Craigmillar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gilmour,_Baron_Gilmour_of_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson ie describing it as being edited by (UK) right wing ideologues is factually true.
arnaudsm 3y ago
This is the circle of life. FAANG is the new IBM. Who will succeed them? Chinese big tech? Next gen full remote startups? Or will the public stop trusting tech entirely ?
- simultsop 3y ago
  Huge distances in-between your predictions. Why approach it as Chinese big tech when it is us earthlings developing tech? Not that public stops trusting tech but it should not become a burden to give or take trust. Full remote, I guess was always here, we just allowed it once in a while, in rotations, I guess if a company has top MRR, ARR, wont be caring about it. I believe tagging not a good practice, makes no sense at all, even creates disgust.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  To be honest, out of all the FAANG, I think Apple still mostly holds true to it's original promise of trying to make the world better. Do I think they're perfect, absolutely not, not even close. But compared to Google, Amazon and Facebook (which IMO just seem like total and utter nightmare fuel freak shows), they just seem sane, trustworthy and purposeful to me. Netflix, I'm fairly neutral about, I just think their products and their shows are absolutely shit so I plan to cancel my subscription soon, I don't feel strongly about it.
  - tudorw 3y ago
    If they wanted to make the world better, they'd build what people want and need, not what they will buy.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      What do people want and need? Personally, I don't own an Apple product I don't constantly get value out of. Whether it's a 10+ year old Macbook Pro, iPhone or an Apple Watch. I'd never trust anything but iCloud with anything I'd like to keep private. Meta? lol not a freaking chance in hell.
ChatGTP 3y ago
Seems like an important and timely article. I feel like SV has just become a hostile and quite frankly a "weird" place. I guess it always has been but the emperor really has no clothes now. Not much can be done honestly. I think the mix between AI and social media is a poisonous and hyper dangerous mind control cocktail which really needs to be shutdown. The big money in SV just seems quite rudderless and out of control. Dangerously out of control. Now we'll just throw some "AI" into the mix and hope for the best. The US government is unlikely to help, they're totally reliant on the tech companies to help win elections so we're in for a very bumpy, hopefully not catastrophic ride while things plays out and hopefully improve. The saddest thing I've seen lately is how addictive YouTube has become for children, it's absolutely disgusting. Yes, we can blame parents but can we really only blame parents? Most adults are addicted themselves and don't even understand why or how it's happening. I've seen kids having tantrums after looking at screens for hours watching rubbish like Minecraft commentary videos. They seem quite distressed in a way I've not really seen before. It's quite honestly disturbing. As a kid, I watched TV, yes, but I watched fairly benign shows and then when it was over, some "boring" adult show would come on like the news, and I'd go outside and play. Not take a device with me. > Today the vast majority of Americans are inclined to fear the tech elite, and the industry’s approval dropped dramatically even before the pandemic. Today’s Valley is a far cry from the life-improving, concrete promise of twentieth-century industrial achievement. People see that tech’s giants reap fortunes from ever greater surveillance and socially destructive social media; tech’s contributions to well-being and economic prosperity are far more difficult to keep front of mind. This has never been further from the truth, I think people are in shock honestly and I do feel like the average tech user is waking up from their addictions, but these companies truly have a mind an inertia of their own now. Good luck to all. We can only remain hopeful and optimistic.
pfdietz 3y ago
If the FTC cracks down on anticompetes nationally, Silicon Valley loses one of its big historical reasons for existing.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  I will be pleasantly appraised if the FTC even begins enforcing anticompetitive at all. They might hit some with small fine here and there, and occasionally an acquisition is blocked. But Apple getting away with their ban on third party app stores and browser engines after swinging at Microsft for years over shipping IE pre-installed? Google owning the dominant web brower, search engine, analytics platform, and a major ad sales network? I'm not a fan of heavy government regulations, but if we're going to have the laws they should at least be enforced equally and fairly.
linguae 3y ago
I might be looking at things with rose-colored glasses, and I'm relatively young (mid-30s) and so my perception about Silicon Valley's past may be completely wrong, but I believe there was a major cultural shift in Silicon Valley that began sometime around 2012 when the area started emerging from the 2008 financial crisis. While making money was always the goal of corporations, I am under the impression that before the past decade there seemed to also be a deep love for technology by Silicon Valley engineers and businesspersons. Think of the innovations that came out of Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Apple, Netscape, early Google, Sun Microsystems, SGI, and many other companies. There seemed to be a passion behind technology and a genuine belief that the world can be made a better place with better technologies. Even Apple under John Sculley and Michael Spindler seemed to be much more visionary than Apple under Tim Cook; think of the Knowledge Navigator, as well as all of the projects that came out of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. In short, Silicon Valley seemed to be a mecca for computer nerds, and I enjoyed moments of this when I started working in Silicon Valley a decade ago. What changed in the past decade, in my opinion, is this mercenary attitude toward technology. To me it seems that the industry seems to be dominated by those who care about making money at all costs, technological vision, passion, and ethics be damned. "Move fast and break things" has been abused; its original definition of encouraging agile development and taking risks has unfortunately been used by some to promote technological recklessness: applying technology without considering its consequences. Many companies I've once respected seem to no longer be about how they can best serve their users by selling good products and services, it's now about how companies can milk their users as much as they can. Many interesting places that helped define the old Silicon Valley, such as warehouses filled with used computer hardware, are gone now, as the cost of living rose to astronomical levels. Speaking of the high cost of living, this has pushed out many lower-income and middle-income earners, and it's even a squeeze for engineers. I believe this only further promotes a mercenary attitude toward technology: if you want to purchase a house in a safe neighborhood with good schools for your children, you must optimize for money. It no longer seems to be a nerd mecca anymore. What are some solutions? I really think America needs to deal with its housing and higher education costs. There is a chronic shortage of housing in this country, leading to sky-high home prices in America's job centers. These prices remain stubbornly high despite the doubling of mortgage rates that took place since 2022. There is also a problem with high college costs and large student loan debt loads. The high cost of living combined with high student loan debt loads means that many Americans are not in a position to bootstrap their own businesses or work for employers that may pay less than Big Tech but also don't follow Big Tech's business practices. Dealing with these very high costs may mean that future generations of technically-inclined people may make career decisions that are less driven by money.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
> The start of this decline has coincided with a shift from the physical to the virtual. There is certainly a wistfulness I have for when Silicon Valley made things rather than assembled software stacks. For me it was when Fry's Electronics (open until midnight?) sold wire-wrap boards, junk food and porn magazines, not flat-screen plasma TVs and massage chairs. It was Weird Stuff Warehouse, Disk Drive Depot, the Computer Literacy Bookstore, (Halted/Haltek) HSC Electronics and the weekend surplus crawl that would turn up hardware prototypes, power supplies, vintage numerical LED displays.... I suppose ultimately it was a combination of the weight of the internet that settled into the valley and the off-shore commoditization of hardware that caused the gradual shift to where the valley is now.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > the weekend surplus crawl that would turn up hardware prototypes, power supplies, vintage numerical LED displays.... I was living in London at that time (it's not restricted to SV). There were electronic surplus stores in Edgeware Road; you could buy used ham-radio sets, PCBs that might or might not work (depending on whether you knew what they were supposed to do in the first place), nixie tubes, used oscilloscopes and whatever, and all kinds of components. Then gentrification hit the area, and the shops are all now (and have been for 30 years) big-box outlets for TVs and surround-sound rigs. I regret the passing of tinkerer shops.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    My understanding is the same is happening to the Akihabara's famous warren of small parts sellers.
- klipklop 3y ago
  Makes me sad none of this stuff really exists anymore. The South Bay Area is soulless and mostly closes at 9pm. If you need electronics you order from Amazon or Digikey like anywhere else in the US.
  - lunaticlabs 3y ago
sys_64738 3y ago
Those who win get to write history and SV winning the mindset means that all the other places in the US that were equally as relevant are airbrushed from history. Boston 128 corridor was just as important and innovative as SV in the 80s and early 90s. Also the companies they mention are always names that survived but there are so many better examples of companies that lead and defined the industries, such as Commodore.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Shouldn't this have been written in 2000? >‘We used to build the future,’ Leslie Parks, who formerly directed redevelopment efforts in San Jose, once told me. ‘Then we designed it, now we just think about it.’ Please give the builders the credit they deserve for thinking and designing, too. It's more like: We used to think about, design, and build the future, then we thought about and designed it, now we just think about it. I went to a "Hackers & Founders" meet-up once, and somebody sat down across from me and asked "Are you a developer, or an idea guy?" I answered, "I'm a developer, but I like to think of myself as capable of coming up with ideas too." Ideas are the easy part. There are a lot of people who fancy themselves "idea guys", with no development or design skills, who desperately want to find some developers to implement their precious ideas for free or cheap on the promise of equity and visibility, and they insist you sign an NDA before they tell you their unique snowflake of an idea, because they don't realize ideas are a dime a dozen, everybody has lots and lots of them, it's easy to come up with them, the hard part is actually sorting through the bad ones and implementing the good times, and lots of ideas are actually a net negative distraction from sticking to working on one good idea for as long as it takes to follow through and implement it well.
ksec 3y ago
>Today tech is dominated by a cognitive elite of Ivy Leaguers, management consultants and MBAs. > The people who built it, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Fairchild Semiconductor co-founder Robert Noyce, and Apple’s Steve Jobs.......They had a vision of how to use new technology to enhance productivity and make money. ( Edit: I would change the make money to bring value, which in itself makes money, subtle but important difference ) >relying on inertia to garner income without worry of competition in what the author David P. Goldman neatly summarises as ‘the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies.’ >Oddly, as the Valley has become more feudal – its reliance on ‘indentured’ H-1B visa holders repeats a very old arrangement – its political culture has become more uniformly progressive. Back in its heyday, the Valley’s disproportionate number of eccentric and oddball engineers and tech visionaries belied a pragmatic political culture. >Today’s Valley is a political monolith...... > ‘people in tech’ can become ‘one of the most powerful political forces’ in the country since they increasingly ‘control’ what he labeled ‘the avenues of distribution.’ Once known as quirky outsiders, the Valley is now the establishment. Given half of the article is about politics, especially politics that is anti-US Left and mostly Anti-HN. I wont be surprised if this drop out of front page soon. Also not surprising this narrative is coming from UK press. As most of the point made will never appear in most US media.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
>> To stand up against such wealth and power will require a melding of the two populist movements: the right-wing nationalists and the traditional, pro-worker left. Right, so what is needed is some kind of national-socialist party with a charismatic, albeit populist leader, that will ... ah... er... uh-oh.

76 points by Veen 3y ago

Veen 3y ago

http://archive.today/exo4z http://archive.today/exo4z

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
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- saagarjha 3y ago
  They called it "evil racism" because that's exactly what it is. Your comment is, quite honestly, appalling–integrating minorities into cities is not "politically motivated ethnic cleansing" by any stretch of the imagination.
- Taniwha 3y ago
  But until relatively recently San Franciso was SV adjacent, not really part of it, more like the grown up cousin up the road where the traditional bankers lived. San Jose has always been the big city in Silicon Valley
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    This is true, those are not the same issues. My understanding is that the center of gravity of the tech scene has moved from Palo Alto and Mountain View to SF in recent years.
bartread 3y ago
It wasn't just this though. Japanese (and later other far eastern countries') cost of labour was far lower, so they could build a better product at a lower price point than American manufacturers. That's not to say that lack of focus on quality and overly-aggressive cost-cutting by Ford and others wasn't a problem - it absolutely was - but the article is substantially oversimplifying the situation. I haven't yet come to a conclusion as to whether that's forgivable in its pursuit of making a bigger point: The Spectator does have a tendency towards superficially high-minded but ultimately ineffectual chatter (which at least fits with its name).
- DebtDeflation 3y ago
  The period from 1973-1983 was known as the "Malaise Era" for US Automakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_era The issue wasn't mainly labor costs, it was a combination of new emissions regulations and rising gas prices along with US Automakers refusal to adopt fuel injection instead doggedly clinging to ever more complicated iterations of the carburetor (the computer controlled carburetors of the early 1980s with their rats nest of wires and vacuum hoses reached peak Rube Goldberg status). Meanwhile, Bosch introduced fuel injection in 1973 and within a couple of years FI was standard on most European and Japanese cars; US automakers waited a decade to adopt it en masse.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Aviation is even more doggedly clinging. You can still buy brand new airplanes with carburetors. The industry is being dragged kicking and screaming into the FI era, and we're also starting to see electronic ignition and even FADEC systems emerging, mostly in the Experimental category.
- hodgesrm 3y ago
  > The Spectator does have a tendency towards superficially high-minded but ultimately ineffectual chatter (which at least fits with its name). The article draws rather thinly supported conclusions about SV from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Yes, the bank failed but so did others like First Republic, and for similar reasons: interest rates went up and left them holding low-interest bonds that undermined their balance sheets. This is plain old bad management. The Fed response is similarly explainable by fear of contagion. It would have been a stronger argument if the Spectotor pointed out that many large VC-funded firms look like pyramid schemes. Wework and Uber are two obvious examples, along with numerous recent database IPOs--firms that still have no clear route to profitability. Not only that, prominent VC firms seemed to double down on the strategy, as evidenced by A16Z funding Adam Neumann (again) after Wework. [0] [0] https://a16z.com/2022/08/15/investing-in-flow/ https://a16z.com/2022/08/15/investing-in-flow/ Edit: typo
VHRanger 3y ago
Detroit's decline is a product of two main factors: 1. Protectionism 2. Recalcitrant unions Protectionism from the tariffs like the Chicken Tax made the US auto industry easily profitable for decades. This meant the industry didn't evolve like the japanese/korean/european counterparts. They could profit even with substandard cars. Unions aren't necessarily bad, on their own. Arguably, the USA needs more unions right now. But they can worsen problems of inefficiency by reducing the adaptability of the org.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  I'd go so far as to say, that recalcitrant unions are more of a symptom of protectionism than a separate thing.
- xg15 3y ago
  I think a good counter example is the pivot of the Ruhr area from a mining and heavy industries hub to an economy centered on tech and services. It happened despite strong union presence in the old sectors. I think one of the deciding factors was a strong social safety net and an active strategy of the state to bring over the employees into the new sectors and don't just leave them stranded with obsolete skills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr#Postwar_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr#Postwar_period https://www.ruhr-guide.de/freizeit/industriekultur/das-ruhrgebiet-die-entwicklung-und-der-strukturwandel/21960,0,0.html https://www.ruhr-guide.de/freizeit/industriekultur/das-ruhrg... (Couldn't find a good article in english unfortunately)
- nradov 3y ago
  Detroit's decline had as much to do with shitty product designs as with protectionism and unions. It wasn't union members who designed the Ford Pinto or Oldsmobile diesel engines.
  - VHRanger 3y ago
    Those designs are the result of the lack of competitive pressure coming from the fact that the Detroit automakers effectively had the US market captured.
threeseed 3y ago
Manufacturing is always going to chase places with the cheapest wages and the laxest of regulations. US didn't squander anything. They just made a choice that the health and wellbeing of workers are important. Just like China has been making which is why many types of manufacturing are moving to South East Asia and India.
- deleted 3y ago
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- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Except American automakers designed shit cars that no one wanted. By the time they had fixed their designs they had acquired a reputation for poor performance cars that break down quickly that sticks with them to this day. American automakers quickly moved production to Mexico, but that wasn't enough to save them from their own shitty designs.

sneak 3y ago

> Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better. This is a rewriting of history. SV started (in the 1950s!) as an outgrowth of the military industrial complex, making tech hardware for DoD radars and missiles. The entrepreneurial, consumer-facing, "change the world" stuff happened afterward.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago
Indeed. The rush to replace WWII-era vacuum tubes with solid state silicon was driven by the need to get US bombers and then missiles on target, and stop the Russians doing the same. For example, Fairchild Semiconductor (Santa Clara) was originally part of a (non-SV: Delaware) optics company that made spy satellite cameras. The semiconductor division's first product in 1957 was a transistor used in the B70 bomber computer and the Minuteman ICBM and it cost over $1600 a unit in today's money.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
I know you are correct, but if Silicon Valley can have more than one "era", I think many people now regard the one that began with the Homebrew Computer Club as being the more significant one at least for modern times.

LatteLazy 3y ago

> Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products. Alternatively, they were pushed to such thin margins by competition that they stopped innovating because anything that didn't show RoI by quarter's end was not permitted. You can see the same thing happening with Airplanes (Boeing etc),

lotsofpulp 3y ago
My understanding of history was that American car brands lowered the quality of their cars and/or could not keep up with quality of Japanese car brands. I am also not sure about the claim that Boeing’s competitors’ low profit margins (Airbus?) caused it to sacrifice quality. Why would we exclude the possibility of Boeing (and McDonnel Douglas) execs wanting to cash out by temporarily boosting their stock price (temporarily being on the order of ~10 to 20 years before their changes could be noted to have an effect on the product).
moritz 3y ago
I highly recommend reading this article [1] re: Boeing. It's the ultimate parable of late-state technocapitalism; and Airbus has really nothing to do with it. [1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...

threeseed 3y ago

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Tanjreeve 3y ago
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- lemetr0l 3y ago
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- hef19898 3y ago
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- defrost 3y ago
  Heh. For any not familiar with The Spectator it's a UK paper that's been a literal UK Conservative Party mouthpiece since its first issue in 1828. Editors have frequently held significant political positions, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gilmour,_Baron_Gilmour_of_Craigmillar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gilmour,_Baron_Gilmour_of_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson ie describing it as being edited by (UK) right wing ideologues is factually true.

arnaudsm 3y ago

This is the circle of life. FAANG is the new IBM. Who will succeed them? Chinese big tech? Next gen full remote startups? Or will the public stop trusting tech entirely ?

simultsop 3y ago
Huge distances in-between your predictions. Why approach it as Chinese big tech when it is us earthlings developing tech? Not that public stops trusting tech but it should not become a burden to give or take trust. Full remote, I guess was always here, we just allowed it once in a while, in rotations, I guess if a company has top MRR, ARR, wont be caring about it. I believe tagging not a good practice, makes no sense at all, even creates disgust.
ChatGTP 3y ago
To be honest, out of all the FAANG, I think Apple still mostly holds true to it's original promise of trying to make the world better. Do I think they're perfect, absolutely not, not even close. But compared to Google, Amazon and Facebook (which IMO just seem like total and utter nightmare fuel freak shows), they just seem sane, trustworthy and purposeful to me. Netflix, I'm fairly neutral about, I just think their products and their shows are absolutely shit so I plan to cancel my subscription soon, I don't feel strongly about it.
- tudorw 3y ago
  If they wanted to make the world better, they'd build what people want and need, not what they will buy.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    What do people want and need? Personally, I don't own an Apple product I don't constantly get value out of. Whether it's a 10+ year old Macbook Pro, iPhone or an Apple Watch. I'd never trust anything but iCloud with anything I'd like to keep private. Meta? lol not a freaking chance in hell.

ChatGTP 3y ago

Seems like an important and timely article. I feel like SV has just become a hostile and quite frankly a "weird" place. I guess it always has been but the emperor really has no clothes now. Not much can be done honestly. I think the mix between AI and social media is a poisonous and hyper dangerous mind control cocktail which really needs to be shutdown. The big money in SV just seems quite rudderless and out of control. Dangerously out of control. Now we'll just throw some "AI" into the mix and hope for the best. The US government is unlikely to help, they're totally reliant on the tech companies to help win elections so we're in for a very bumpy, hopefully not catastrophic ride while things plays out and hopefully improve. The saddest thing I've seen lately is how addictive YouTube has become for children, it's absolutely disgusting. Yes, we can blame parents but can we really only blame parents? Most adults are addicted themselves and don't even understand why or how it's happening. I've seen kids having tantrums after looking at screens for hours watching rubbish like Minecraft commentary videos. They seem quite distressed in a way I've not really seen before. It's quite honestly disturbing. As a kid, I watched TV, yes, but I watched fairly benign shows and then when it was over, some "boring" adult show would come on like the news, and I'd go outside and play. Not take a device with me. > Today the vast majority of Americans are inclined to fear the tech elite, and the industry’s approval dropped dramatically even before the pandemic. Today’s Valley is a far cry from the life-improving, concrete promise of twentieth-century industrial achievement. People see that tech’s giants reap fortunes from ever greater surveillance and socially destructive social media; tech’s contributions to well-being and economic prosperity are far more difficult to keep front of mind. This has never been further from the truth, I think people are in shock honestly and I do feel like the average tech user is waking up from their addictions, but these companies truly have a mind an inertia of their own now. Good luck to all. We can only remain hopeful and optimistic.

pfdietz 3y ago

If the FTC cracks down on anticompetes nationally, Silicon Valley loses one of its big historical reasons for existing.

flagrant_taco 3y ago
I will be pleasantly appraised if the FTC even begins enforcing anticompetitive at all. They might hit some with small fine here and there, and occasionally an acquisition is blocked. But Apple getting away with their ban on third party app stores and browser engines after swinging at Microsft for years over shipping IE pre-installed? Google owning the dominant web brower, search engine, analytics platform, and a major ad sales network? I'm not a fan of heavy government regulations, but if we're going to have the laws they should at least be enforced equally and fairly.

linguae 3y ago

I might be looking at things with rose-colored glasses, and I'm relatively young (mid-30s) and so my perception about Silicon Valley's past may be completely wrong, but I believe there was a major cultural shift in Silicon Valley that began sometime around 2012 when the area started emerging from the 2008 financial crisis. While making money was always the goal of corporations, I am under the impression that before the past decade there seemed to also be a deep love for technology by Silicon Valley engineers and businesspersons. Think of the innovations that came out of Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Apple, Netscape, early Google, Sun Microsystems, SGI, and many other companies. There seemed to be a passion behind technology and a genuine belief that the world can be made a better place with better technologies. Even Apple under John Sculley and Michael Spindler seemed to be much more visionary than Apple under Tim Cook; think of the Knowledge Navigator, as well as all of the projects that came out of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. In short, Silicon Valley seemed to be a mecca for computer nerds, and I enjoyed moments of this when I started working in Silicon Valley a decade ago. What changed in the past decade, in my opinion, is this mercenary attitude toward technology. To me it seems that the industry seems to be dominated by those who care about making money at all costs, technological vision, passion, and ethics be damned. "Move fast and break things" has been abused; its original definition of encouraging agile development and taking risks has unfortunately been used by some to promote technological recklessness: applying technology without considering its consequences. Many companies I've once respected seem to no longer be about how they can best serve their users by selling good products and services, it's now about how companies can milk their users as much as they can. Many interesting places that helped define the old Silicon Valley, such as warehouses filled with used computer hardware, are gone now, as the cost of living rose to astronomical levels. Speaking of the high cost of living, this has pushed out many lower-income and middle-income earners, and it's even a squeeze for engineers. I believe this only further promotes a mercenary attitude toward technology: if you want to purchase a house in a safe neighborhood with good schools for your children, you must optimize for money. It no longer seems to be a nerd mecca anymore. What are some solutions? I really think America needs to deal with its housing and higher education costs. There is a chronic shortage of housing in this country, leading to sky-high home prices in America's job centers. These prices remain stubbornly high despite the doubling of mortgage rates that took place since 2022. There is also a problem with high college costs and large student loan debt loads. The high cost of living combined with high student loan debt loads means that many Americans are not in a position to bootstrap their own businesses or work for employers that may pay less than Big Tech but also don't follow Big Tech's business practices. Dealing with these very high costs may mean that future generations of technically-inclined people may make career decisions that are less driven by money.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

> The start of this decline has coincided with a shift from the physical to the virtual. There is certainly a wistfulness I have for when Silicon Valley made things rather than assembled software stacks. For me it was when Fry's Electronics (open until midnight?) sold wire-wrap boards, junk food and porn magazines, not flat-screen plasma TVs and massage chairs. It was Weird Stuff Warehouse, Disk Drive Depot, the Computer Literacy Bookstore, (Halted/Haltek) HSC Electronics and the weekend surplus crawl that would turn up hardware prototypes, power supplies, vintage numerical LED displays.... I suppose ultimately it was a combination of the weight of the internet that settled into the valley and the off-shore commoditization of hardware that caused the gradual shift to where the valley is now.

denton-scratch 3y ago
> the weekend surplus crawl that would turn up hardware prototypes, power supplies, vintage numerical LED displays.... I was living in London at that time (it's not restricted to SV). There were electronic surplus stores in Edgeware Road; you could buy used ham-radio sets, PCBs that might or might not work (depending on whether you knew what they were supposed to do in the first place), nixie tubes, used oscilloscopes and whatever, and all kinds of components. Then gentrification hit the area, and the shops are all now (and have been for 30 years) big-box outlets for TVs and surround-sound rigs. I regret the passing of tinkerer shops.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  My understanding is the same is happening to the Akihabara's famous warren of small parts sellers.
klipklop 3y ago
Makes me sad none of this stuff really exists anymore. The South Bay Area is soulless and mostly closes at 9pm. If you need electronics you order from Amazon or Digikey like anywhere else in the US.
- lunaticlabs 3y ago

sys_64738 3y ago

Those who win get to write history and SV winning the mindset means that all the other places in the US that were equally as relevant are airbrushed from history. Boston 128 corridor was just as important and innovative as SV in the 80s and early 90s. Also the companies they mention are always names that survived but there are so many better examples of companies that lead and defined the industries, such as Commodore.

DonHopkins 3y ago

Shouldn't this have been written in 2000? >‘We used to build the future,’ Leslie Parks, who formerly directed redevelopment efforts in San Jose, once told me. ‘Then we designed it, now we just think about it.’ Please give the builders the credit they deserve for thinking and designing, too. It's more like: We used to think about, design, and build the future, then we thought about and designed it, now we just think about it. I went to a "Hackers & Founders" meet-up once, and somebody sat down across from me and asked "Are you a developer, or an idea guy?" I answered, "I'm a developer, but I like to think of myself as capable of coming up with ideas too." Ideas are the easy part. There are a lot of people who fancy themselves "idea guys", with no development or design skills, who desperately want to find some developers to implement their precious ideas for free or cheap on the promise of equity and visibility, and they insist you sign an NDA before they tell you their unique snowflake of an idea, because they don't realize ideas are a dime a dozen, everybody has lots and lots of them, it's easy to come up with them, the hard part is actually sorting through the bad ones and implementing the good times, and lots of ideas are actually a net negative distraction from sticking to working on one good idea for as long as it takes to follow through and implement it well.

ksec 3y ago

>Today tech is dominated by a cognitive elite of Ivy Leaguers, management consultants and MBAs. > The people who built it, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Fairchild Semiconductor co-founder Robert Noyce, and Apple’s Steve Jobs.......They had a vision of how to use new technology to enhance productivity and make money. ( Edit: I would change the make money to bring value, which in itself makes money, subtle but important difference ) >relying on inertia to garner income without worry of competition in what the author David P. Goldman neatly summarises as ‘the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies.’ >Oddly, as the Valley has become more feudal – its reliance on ‘indentured’ H-1B visa holders repeats a very old arrangement – its political culture has become more uniformly progressive. Back in its heyday, the Valley’s disproportionate number of eccentric and oddball engineers and tech visionaries belied a pragmatic political culture. >Today’s Valley is a political monolith...... > ‘people in tech’ can become ‘one of the most powerful political forces’ in the country since they increasingly ‘control’ what he labeled ‘the avenues of distribution.’ Once known as quirky outsiders, the Valley is now the establishment. Given half of the article is about politics, especially politics that is anti-US Left and mostly Anti-HN. I wont be surprised if this drop out of front page soon. Also not surprising this narrative is coming from UK press. As most of the point made will never appear in most US media.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

>> To stand up against such wealth and power will require a melding of the two populist movements: the right-wing nationalists and the traditional, pro-worker left. Right, so what is needed is some kind of national-socialist party with a charismatic, albeit populist leader, that will ... ah... er... uh-oh.