While the tax and jobs benefits are there, I'm not sure it's that big a deal. IT companies create less jobs per revenue dollar than traditional industries, do their manufacturing in asia and shift significant operations to overseas tax havens when they get big. It's not that I'm saying the US doesn't benefit from high tech startups, just that the effect is somewhat muted.
On the other hand, with such a majority of the world's service providers concentrated in just a few west coast cities I think there are some risks for the global Internet. What if someday we all found out that facebook, twitter and google were all collaborating with the government in a massive warrantless wiretap program ala AT&T et al. Wouldn't you be happier knowing there were some viable competitors out there based in .au .tw .ch .in etc? Is it possible that would have prevented it from happening to begin with? I'm not saying that's likely, but clearly there could be some benefits to a more politically and physically distributed infrastructure. What happens to the world if the US triggers their Internet kill switch? A lot more than when .ly did presumably. What if the world misses out on the next big thing because of the tight knit group think that exists in the bay area capital scene? Mother of all earthquakes? State government collapses? Dirty bomb?
I'm not saying I'd bet on any of those happening, or that SV isn't a good place to start a tech firm, or that anyone should pack up and leave. Just that I wouldn't shed many tears if I saw more of http://thenextsocialhotness.eu/
Monocultures can be pretty fragile when exposed to a brand new threat.
The biggest impact that tech companies provide to the economy is increasing productivity and creating new industries.
IBM, Microsoft, and Apple's contributions to creating the first personal computers when they started up created an entirely new segment of the IT industry that hadn't even been conceptualized before. As time passed, there were millions of people getting jobs as technicians, programmers, system administrators, and service providers.
Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and Netscape enabled the Internet to be a viable platform and communication medium. You had even more jobs created: more programmers, web developers, web designers, and service providers.
Google did their thing and revolutionized how people could monetize things on the Internet, and how people could get their websites, products, and services discovered. It`s pretty much because of them that many websites became viable businesses, to say nothing of how SEO also became an industry in its own right.
Now see Facebook, Twitter, Android (acquired by Google in 2005; if you want, you can throw Apple's iPhone group in there too, though by this time, they can no longer be counted as a startup). They've created social media ad agencies, app developer economic microcosms, and so on.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The benefit that tech companies create is not from direct employment. It`s from overall worldwide productivity gains and creation of new industries. And if it happens in your home nation first, you get a head start to ride the wave before the wave really takes hold in other nations.
On the other hand, with such a majority of the world's service providers concentrated in just a few west coast cities I think there are some risks for the global Internet. What if someday we all found out that facebook, twitter and google were all collaborating with the government in a massive warrantless wiretap program ala AT&T et al. Wouldn't you be happier knowing there were some viable competitors out there based in .au .tw .ch .in etc? Is it possible that would have prevented it from happening to begin with? I'm not saying that's likely, but clearly there could be some benefits to a more politically and physically distributed infrastructure. What happens to the world if the US triggers their Internet kill switch? A lot more than when .ly did presumably. What if the world misses out on the next big thing because of the tight knit group think that exists in the bay area capital scene? Mother of all earthquakes? State government collapses? Dirty bomb?
I'm not saying I'd bet on any of those happening, or that SV isn't a good place to start a tech firm, or that anyone should pack up and leave. Just that I wouldn't shed many tears if I saw more of http://thenextsocialhotness.eu/
Monocultures can be pretty fragile when exposed to a brand new threat.