>Note: I bet many people didn't think Zuckerberg and others paid visits to the old guard to learn old lessons for IT
I see a couple of anecdotes, not a recipe for success, or even a pattern.
I agree that Silicon Valley arose from magic (or luck), and that it can't be recreated. But it doesn't need to be. The Valley will lose influence for precisely the reason it claims strength in the article; money and computer software can move anywhere, now more than ever. And mobility is increasing fast.
Technology development is diffusing, globally. Believe it or not, many people have cultural roots and don't want to leave their home town...or country. SV is still highly influential, but that will wane over time.
Magic? Luck? Or just plain old government money? ... In fact, he says, before there was was Silicon Valley, there was Microwave Valley, which specialized in electronic intelligence—spying on Soviets air defenses, basically—and the seed capital for it came exclusively from the CIA and military. Private capital arrived much later.
At one point, says Blank, the institutions of the Valley were so totally in the pocket of the Department of Defense that Stanford became essentially a research lab for the CIA. A number of engineering Ph. D. theses were actually classified. The largest employer at the time—and still the third largest for-profit employer in the valley is not Google, and certainly not Facebook. It’s Lockheed Martin."
http://www.inc.com/eric-schurenberg/inconvenient-history-of-...
There was a ton of government work over there. Many tech in the U.S. are also funded with DARPA, NSF, etc. By the time it hits press, the involvement of U.S. government or academia is usually minimized if we're talking a product rather than research result.
Anyway, this great (and long...) book will give you an idea just how much the U.S. government (esp defense) funded our computing advances back in the day. A chunk of that probably went to Silicon Valley, too.
I see a couple of anecdotes, not a recipe for success, or even a pattern.
I agree that Silicon Valley arose from magic (or luck), and that it can't be recreated. But it doesn't need to be. The Valley will lose influence for precisely the reason it claims strength in the article; money and computer software can move anywhere, now more than ever. And mobility is increasing fast.
Technology development is diffusing, globally. Believe it or not, many people have cultural roots and don't want to leave their home town...or country. SV is still highly influential, but that will wane over time.