Good news, or bad news?
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| BernardSwiss Sep 04, 2013 7:19 PM EDT |
I really can't decide. |
| notbob Sep 04, 2013 9:54 PM EDT |
I worked in SV during it's heyday prior to the dot-com crash when I was layed off like thousands of others. Seven yrs ago I visited SV. It was a ghost town. I mean that literally. The hundreds of corporate campuses and the hundreds of businesses that suported them were ALL deserted. Even the short lived biotech boom moved up the bay to Emeryville, leaving the super high priced campuses --some never occupied upon being built-- to bleach in the Southbay sun. While there are SOME die-hard holdouts, like Apple and Google, it's mostly a landscape as desolate as a bad zombie movie. If there was no patent office back when the traffic was eight lanes wide and took three signal light cycles to get through, there sure is not likely to be one now. |
| BernardSwiss Sep 04, 2013 10:16 PM EDT |
thanks, notbob -- I had no idea that this was the situation. |
| notbob Sep 05, 2013 5:04 AM EDT |
Yep. Much like deserted steel towns in the rust belt or old mining boom towns of the Old West, hi-tech centers have sprang up and crashed with boring regularity. I now live in CO and again see the now vacant sky-high glass and steel monoliths of once blossoming hi-tech centers in Ft Collins and Denver. What high tech we still have left in this country has very much spread out to ever lower priced real estate or concentrated in the depressed economies of the Deep South in places like TX and NC. I've no doubt the US continues to innovate and develop ever more advanced technologies, but if that innovation entails manufacturing a hard product, it quickly moves offshore. And, despite its sophisticated reputation and sleek manicured "campuses", In its prime SV was, at its heart, a manufacturing center. Hard to imagine a Superfund site still receiving landscaping service to maintain appearances, but that's SV. ;) |
| djohnston Sep 05, 2013 5:48 AM EDT |
TX a depressed economy? Hmmm. Have all the Bentleys been replaced by Rolls Royces? |
| Bob_Robertson Sep 05, 2013 8:56 AM EDT |
Notbob, I haven't been back since leaving in 1999, but I wouldn't be surprised. That .com boom/bust was astounding, but the manufacturing and research was real and long term. Hopefully, those beautiful campuses can be re-purposed. |
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