Dan Gillmor seems to question whether Silicon Valley even has a future:
Silicon Valley as Gated Community. NY Times: Profits, Not Jobs, on the Rebound in Silicon Valley. In the last three years, profits at the seven largest companies in Silicon Valley by market value have increased by an average of more than 500 percent while Santa Clara County employment has declined to 767,600, from 787,200. During the previous economic recovery, between 1995 and 1997, the county, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, added more than 82,800 jobs.
A few years ago, in my Mercury News column, I wondered if Silicon Valley was not, in the end, creating the tools of collaboration and communication that would make it much less necessary to be here. Almost everyone I talked with said it would never happen. Maybe it's happening after all, at least for workers we once considered some of the cream of the crop. . .
A Berkeley professor is quoted in this [NYT] story as saying the valley is "moving up the value chain." . . .
[Dan Gillmor's blog]
"Moving up the value chain" is the code-phrase that's supposed to take the edge off the fear surrounding offshoring by making us believe that all the smart, creative, high-value jobs are going to stay here while the low-value work goes offshore. But I'm not at all sure that I believe it: there's some very smart, very creative work being done in places other than Silicon Valley. There's no reason to believe that the rest of the world can't also move up the value chain; we don't have a lock on it.
Yes, the collaboration and communication tools we've made here are being used to enable the global economy. And we'll keep making more new tools, and we'll go on creating new and better ways of working. But it won't be just us.
The new issue of Wired has a piece on Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC business, focusing on the Chinese company's acknowledgement that they need to learn American (IBM, anyway) management skills. And learn them they will, and if their governmenet doesn't muck it up, they'll wind up beating us. The Japanese took the quality management knowledge that we wouldn't use and beat us with it, and I'll bet the Chinese will do the same.
But then I'm not learning Mandarin just yet. . .
9:10:27 PM 
|
|
