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>> Also, remember that most of "silicon valley" isn't involved in technology any more. It's become mostly a media/advertising center. There are still technology

by ultimoo 11y ago

>> Also, remember that most of "silicon valley" isn't involved in technology any more. It's become mostly a media/advertising center. There are still technology companies around, but the focus has definitely shifted. Can you please elaborate?

fredkbloggs 11y ago
I think a deeper discussion of what it means to be a technology company and the focus of bay area companies would be a hijack here. But, very briefly, if you view Google and Facebook as "technology companies", we disagree. The closest analogue to Google in terms of business model is a company now called Dex but for decades known as R. H. Donnelley and Sons, which published telephone books and sold advertising in them in the form of the Yellow Pages. Facebook's best analogue is probably a reality television show production company. These companies and many of their brethren are not in the business of developing and marketing new technology. They are in the media business and any technology they happen to develop is a sideshow. It may be used internally and never shared or it may be made open source for any of a number of (usually sound) business reasons, but the development and marketing of that technology is neither the company's primary business nor a significant source of its revenue. If you don't believe me, read the 10-Ks. You are what your revenue says you are. There are many, many other examples. If you look at a random sampling of promotional posts to HN, you will see a cross-section of the entire global economy: retailers (lots of 'em), restaurants, media, manufacturing, and yes, technology. It's fair to say that a lot of people in the bay area are interested in technology, but most of their employers are properly placed in other sectors based on their business models, revenue sources, and other objective metrics. The development of new technology for sale as a business model has been in decline for a long time and is far from dominant in the bay area today. Note that this is not necessarily good or bad. It just is, and reflects a transition among a group of people from developing new technologies to exploiting that technology in more traditional business models.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Technology is always a means to an end, though. During the 50s and 60s, the technology being developed in Silicon Valley was all about how to make death rain down from the sky. The first wave of Silicon Valley immigration started with Lockheed's Polaris missile program. Fairchild Semiconductor was financed by a company that got started manufacturing bombsights, machine gun cameras, and spy satellites. Hewlett Packard started out building artillery shell fuses and anti-radar devices. Lawrence Livermore Labs was where nearly every atomic bomb of the cold war was developed. Usually when people talk of the bygone era when Silicon Valley was actually about technology, they're referring to one of two things: 1.) A particular sort of nostalgic history whitewashing where we forget that the money for all of these fundamental innovations largely came from DARPA contracts to find new, more efficient ways to vaporize Russians. 2.) The PC revolution of the 1970s, which started at Intel and PARC and then spread through Homebrew, Apple, and numerous other startups. Both of these apply the benefit of hindsight to what was actually going on at the time. There's plenty of the old Homebrew culture still going on in Silicon Valley - all you have to do is go to Maker Faire to see it. It's just that right now, at this moment, without the benefit of hindsight, it just looks like a bunch of geeks tinkering with toys.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    I thought HP's first product was an oscillator, used in the theramin that produced music for Disney's Fantasia. Or is that an urban legend?
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      That was their first product, but their sales took off because of defense contracts during WW2, growing from $100K in 1940 to millions of dollars by the end of the war. http://www.smecc.org/hewlett-packard_the_start__-2.htm http://www.smecc.org/hewlett-packard_the_start__-2.htm http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/264529/Hewlett-Packard-Company http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/264529/Hewlett-Pac...
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    I'm contrasting mainly #2 (although the source of funds for the development of novel technology doesn't seem relevant in the abstract here, so #1 applies too) with the current state of affairs. In the 70s and 80s, Silicon Valley was primarily interested in making new hardware and software to put inside metal boxes, then selling the box and its contents as the solution to some problem the buyer has (or not). Today, the bay area's "tech" companies are primarily interested in writing or customizing software to solve some set of their own problems with whatever business they're really in. Those are very different ways of making money. Neither is wrong, but I submit that only the former makes you a "technology company". Otherwise every company is a technology company and the term means nothing.
avn2109 11y ago
Not the OP, but in the golden age of Valley tech, say when Hewlett and Packard were still building great O-scopes full time, the dominant business model was "let's build this really useful apparatus and then sell it." Today, the dominant business model is "let's find a way to get a lot of people's attention and then sell the right to show them propaganda." Obviously these models are not even approximately equivalent and will attract/create very different ecosystems.
- DannyBee 11y ago
  Sure, but, the dominant business model would have been that back then too, if the economy supported it at the time. There are, in fact, a lot more companies now that do what Hewlett and Packard were doing then. One can't reasonably expect that set of companies would grow to infinite size, because the economy can only support so many of these types of businesses. So if we want to define only the former business model as a technology company, the end result would probably be "we've hit the limit of supportable technology companies, there will be no more technology companies until that changes". Because of this, it doesn't really make sense to define it that way[1]. It turns out the economy seems to support more of this other kind of business, so it has become dominant. That too is the natural order of things. Otherwise, this is like OP complaining "man, there aren't a lot of paper mills anymore", when the economy doesn't support paper mills being around anymore. [1] Though it is, of course, reasonable to have liked it better back in those days if you did.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

by ultimoo 11y ago

fredkbloggs 11y ago

I think a deeper discussion of what it means to be a technology company and the focus of bay area companies would be a hijack here. But, very briefly, if you view Google and Facebook as "technology companies", we disagree. The closest analogue to Google in terms of business model is a company now called Dex but for decades known as R. H. Donnelley and Sons, which published telephone books and sold advertising in them in the form of the Yellow Pages. Facebook's best analogue is probably a reality television show production company. These companies and many of their brethren are not in the business of developing and marketing new technology. They are in the media business and any technology they happen to develop is a sideshow. It may be used internally and never shared or it may be made open source for any of a number of (usually sound) business reasons, but the development and marketing of that technology is neither the company's primary business nor a significant source of its revenue. If you don't believe me, read the 10-Ks. You are what your revenue says you are. There are many, many other examples. If you look at a random sampling of promotional posts to HN, you will see a cross-section of the entire global economy: retailers (lots of 'em), restaurants, media, manufacturing, and yes, technology. It's fair to say that a lot of people in the bay area are interested in technology, but most of their employers are properly placed in other sectors based on their business models, revenue sources, and other objective metrics. The development of new technology for sale as a business model has been in decline for a long time and is far from dominant in the bay area today. Note that this is not necessarily good or bad. It just is, and reflects a transition among a group of people from developing new technologies to exploiting that technology in more traditional business models.

nostrademons 11y ago
Technology is always a means to an end, though. During the 50s and 60s, the technology being developed in Silicon Valley was all about how to make death rain down from the sky. The first wave of Silicon Valley immigration started with Lockheed's Polaris missile program. Fairchild Semiconductor was financed by a company that got started manufacturing bombsights, machine gun cameras, and spy satellites. Hewlett Packard started out building artillery shell fuses and anti-radar devices. Lawrence Livermore Labs was where nearly every atomic bomb of the cold war was developed. Usually when people talk of the bygone era when Silicon Valley was actually about technology, they're referring to one of two things: 1.) A particular sort of nostalgic history whitewashing where we forget that the money for all of these fundamental innovations largely came from DARPA contracts to find new, more efficient ways to vaporize Russians. 2.) The PC revolution of the 1970s, which started at Intel and PARC and then spread through Homebrew, Apple, and numerous other startups. Both of these apply the benefit of hindsight to what was actually going on at the time. There's plenty of the old Homebrew culture still going on in Silicon Valley - all you have to do is go to Maker Faire to see it. It's just that right now, at this moment, without the benefit of hindsight, it just looks like a bunch of geeks tinkering with toys.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  I thought HP's first product was an oscillator, used in the theramin that produced music for Disney's Fantasia. Or is that an urban legend?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    That was their first product, but their sales took off because of defense contracts during WW2, growing from $100K in 1940 to millions of dollars by the end of the war. http://www.smecc.org/hewlett-packard_the_start__-2.htm http://www.smecc.org/hewlett-packard_the_start__-2.htm http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/264529/Hewlett-Packard-Company http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/264529/Hewlett-Pac...
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  I'm contrasting mainly #2 (although the source of funds for the development of novel technology doesn't seem relevant in the abstract here, so #1 applies too) with the current state of affairs. In the 70s and 80s, Silicon Valley was primarily interested in making new hardware and software to put inside metal boxes, then selling the box and its contents as the solution to some problem the buyer has (or not). Today, the bay area's "tech" companies are primarily interested in writing or customizing software to solve some set of their own problems with whatever business they're really in. Those are very different ways of making money. Neither is wrong, but I submit that only the former makes you a "technology company". Otherwise every company is a technology company and the term means nothing.

avn2109 11y ago

Not the OP, but in the golden age of Valley tech, say when Hewlett and Packard were still building great O-scopes full time, the dominant business model was "let's build this really useful apparatus and then sell it." Today, the dominant business model is "let's find a way to get a lot of people's attention and then sell the right to show them propaganda." Obviously these models are not even approximately equivalent and will attract/create very different ecosystems.

DannyBee 11y ago
Sure, but, the dominant business model would have been that back then too, if the economy supported it at the time. There are, in fact, a lot more companies now that do what Hewlett and Packard were doing then. One can't reasonably expect that set of companies would grow to infinite size, because the economy can only support so many of these types of businesses. So if we want to define only the former business model as a technology company, the end result would probably be "we've hit the limit of supportable technology companies, there will be no more technology companies until that changes". Because of this, it doesn't really make sense to define it that way[1]. It turns out the economy seems to support more of this other kind of business, so it has become dominant. That too is the natural order of things. Otherwise, this is like OP complaining "man, there aren't a lot of paper mills anymore", when the economy doesn't support paper mills being around anymore. [1] Though it is, of course, reasonable to have liked it better back in those days if you did.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]