An awful lot of it is explained by the lack of the need for minicomputers as consumer hardware began to make them unneeded and the downfall of DEC. While DEC tried to get into other fields such as workstations with their Alpha RISC processor, workstations weren't a great market either as they too were becoming threatened by consumer hardware.
yes, and the gap has widened every year since. Not even locals refer to it as Route 128, because it has since been subsumed by I-95 (fed's money).
The pay is dismal in MA and most Harvard/MIT/Tufts grads worth their salt, leave town on graduation day, for NYC or SF. Texas has more Biotech opps now than MA, thanks to crazy high lab space rents.
MA Governor spent nearly $1B on housing illegals last year, and allocated $0.1B for AI development over the next5 years.
> Texas has more Biotech opps now than MA, thanks to crazy high lab space rents.
For anyone confused by this I looked it up. The number of life sciences (biotech + biopharma) employees in the state of Texas is less than 50% the number of life sciences employees in greater Boston. The amount of venture funding is roughly 10%. the venture AUM is comparatively tiny. The total number of big pharma research HQs is significantly smaller. I'm not sure the whole state of Texas would even outrank the research triangle.
Life Sciences is misleading because it includes lots of teaching hospitals which are funded by the Feds, and not the states and don't do biotech nor any product development, but employ thousands of low paid academic post-docs and researchers.
I explicitly excluded those from my research, including only employees of for-profits. While federally funded research is important, it would be misleading to include academia in employment figures.
To wit, Harvard alone has 10000 medical research faculty. I can only imagine how many grad students are toiling away in all those labs (or were, before the dismantling of NIH).
> MA Governor ... allocated $0.1B for AI development over the next5 years.
I'd be surprised if California or any other state allocated more than $0 for AI development. This is one area that the private sector is not underfunding.
I don't agree with the author stating that people expected that if one region would dominate tech it would be Route 128 and not Silicon Valley. Further, Harvard and MIT are part of Route 128; Yale and Brown are not, and certainly not Bell Labs.
I do agree that the Bay area in the 1970s and 1980s was first among equals, as opposed to the dominant/preeminent role it has had since then. Consider personal computers. Tandy? Fort Worth. Commodore? Suburban Philadelphia. The PC was developed at IBM Boca Raton (Miami) and run from there and Armonk/Yorktown (Westchester County), with the San Jose office having little input. Compaq? Houston.
Or software. Everyone knows about Microsoft and Seattle, but Ashton-Tate was in Los Angeles and Lotus in Cambridge.
There's a reason why the Computer Bowl during the 1980s had "East Coast" and "West Coast" teams, with Bill Gates captaining the latter despite Microsoft not having a regional office until it bought Forethought in 1987 for PowerPoint. (I suppose today the teams would be "Peninsula", "Valley", "San Francisco", and "rest of world".)
Isn't it strange that before the widespread adoption of the internet advances in computing were more distributed, but after they've consolidated into the Bay Area?
We know one reason is the concentration of venture capital (almost all the major Boston VCs are now HQ'd out west). And another reason might be non-competes.
But something else must have been at play as well, because it wasn't just one area that the bay sucked the talent out of, it was all of them.
I do wonder what the rise of NY (both in VC dollars and as a startup hub) has to teach us about competing with SV.
WordPerfect and Novell! Amazing that two of the most dominant software companies of the 1980s and 1990s were based in the same medium-sized Utah college town.
An awful lot of it is explained by the lack of the need for minicomputers as consumer hardware began to make them unneeded and the downfall of DEC. While DEC tried to get into other fields such as workstations with their Alpha RISC processor, workstations weren't a great market either as they too were becoming threatened by consumer hardware.
This article is from October 31, 2009.
yes, and the gap has widened every year since. Not even locals refer to it as Route 128, because it has since been subsumed by I-95 (fed's money).
The pay is dismal in MA and most Harvard/MIT/Tufts grads worth their salt, leave town on graduation day, for NYC or SF. Texas has more Biotech opps now than MA, thanks to crazy high lab space rents.
MA Governor spent nearly $1B on housing illegals last year, and allocated $0.1B for AI development over the next5 years.
> Texas has more Biotech opps now than MA, thanks to crazy high lab space rents.
For anyone confused by this I looked it up. The number of life sciences (biotech + biopharma) employees in the state of Texas is less than 50% the number of life sciences employees in greater Boston. The amount of venture funding is roughly 10%. the venture AUM is comparatively tiny. The total number of big pharma research HQs is significantly smaller. I'm not sure the whole state of Texas would even outrank the research triangle.
Life Sciences is misleading because it includes lots of teaching hospitals which are funded by the Feds, and not the states and don't do biotech nor any product development, but employ thousands of low paid academic post-docs and researchers.
I explicitly excluded those from my research, including only employees of for-profits. While federally funded research is important, it would be misleading to include academia in employment figures.
To wit, Harvard alone has 10000 medical research faculty. I can only imagine how many grad students are toiling away in all those labs (or were, before the dismantling of NIH).
> MA Governor ... allocated $0.1B for AI development over the next5 years.
I'd be surprised if California or any other state allocated more than $0 for AI development. This is one area that the private sector is not underfunding.
Does California’s constitution banning non competes and protecting people’s work they do outside of the office have anything to do with it?
IIRC Levy’s Hackers covers this.
I don't agree with the author stating that people expected that if one region would dominate tech it would be Route 128 and not Silicon Valley. Further, Harvard and MIT are part of Route 128; Yale and Brown are not, and certainly not Bell Labs.
I do agree that the Bay area in the 1970s and 1980s was first among equals, as opposed to the dominant/preeminent role it has had since then. Consider personal computers. Tandy? Fort Worth. Commodore? Suburban Philadelphia. The PC was developed at IBM Boca Raton (Miami) and run from there and Armonk/Yorktown (Westchester County), with the San Jose office having little input. Compaq? Houston.
Or software. Everyone knows about Microsoft and Seattle, but Ashton-Tate was in Los Angeles and Lotus in Cambridge.
There's a reason why the Computer Bowl during the 1980s had "East Coast" and "West Coast" teams, with Bill Gates captaining the latter despite Microsoft not having a regional office until it bought Forethought in 1987 for PowerPoint. (I suppose today the teams would be "Peninsula", "Valley", "San Francisco", and "rest of world".)
Isn't it strange that before the widespread adoption of the internet advances in computing were more distributed, but after they've consolidated into the Bay Area?
We know one reason is the concentration of venture capital (almost all the major Boston VCs are now HQ'd out west). And another reason might be non-competes.
But something else must have been at play as well, because it wasn't just one area that the bay sucked the talent out of, it was all of them.
I do wonder what the rise of NY (both in VC dollars and as a startup hub) has to teach us about competing with SV.
Also Word Perfect in Utah.
Also Motorola in Austin and other places.
> Also Word Perfect in Utah.
WordPerfect and Novell! Amazing that two of the most dominant software companies of the 1980s and 1990s were based in the same medium-sized Utah college town.
Apple.