Has Silicon Valley Finally Become sillyConValley, Or Is It Still the Global Technopolis?

by Rob Argento

Not long after the 9/11 tragedy in New York City in September of 2001 a close friend of mine and I were musing about the situation in Silicon Valley and the world in general. It was then that Jenifer first coined the term "Silly Con Valley." It stuck. For me the moniker morphed only slightly to become the title of my memoirs, "sillyConValley: They Set Out to Change the World, Instead the World Changed Them." Indeed that seemed to be the case when I finally evacuated the Valley in August of 2004. As of then, however, I was the lone harbinger of the demise of Silicon Valley and its fall from grace to sillyConValley.

I had been such an enthusiastic believer in the Information Revolution when I arrived in the Valley in 1986. Her Highness Technology would transform the world and mend the human condition. I went on to spend seventeen years developing innumerable technical documents and whitepapers elucidating  "bleeding-edge" technologies ranging from electronic collaboration and human-computer interfaces to exotic e-commerce and bioinformatics for stellar heavyweights like Oracle, Microsoft, and Xerox PARC.

But by 2003 the excitement of the Revolution had somehow become trite, a mere fossil of its former self. "Marcom" (Marketing Communications) was still shouting Revolution! this and Revolution! that but it had become mostly hype. The Valley had set out to change the world. But by the dawn of the new millennium it was the world that had changed the Valley. Big Money, fast money, easy money had taken down the Information Revolution in the form of the Dot Com Dot Bomb. And I wanted out.

But amazingly the Valley bounced back. Two more times, in fact. And it began to look like sillyConValley might never come to pass except between the covers of the 850-page draft lurking on my hard drive in the Coastal Carolinas. So I switched gears and took up the charge as managing editor of FreedomFriends.com. So here we are.

Well, wouldn't you know, now at long last everybody is saying the same thing I was saying in August 2004! Silicon Valley is in deep trouble. Innovation has slowed to a crawl. The VCs (Venture Capitalists) are slow to risk capital. Tens of thousands of square feet of pricey office real estate has "For Rent" placarded on its glassy sides. And many tekkies are beginning to see the handwriting on the wall as more and more work leaves the Valley for India, China and other parts of the world in search of cheaper brains. And what I kept saying, starting with Oracle in 1990, that one day knowledge work would leave America the same way manufacturing did, is now becoming commonplace.

So is the sun setting on the Valley? Or is the Global Technopolis merely passing behind a cloud. Check out the video and see for yourself.