Steve Cisler on Tue, 15 Mar 2005 22:43:11 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Silicon Valley, five years after |
San Jose, California. This past week has been a time to remember the bursting of the dot.com (and some would say the Internet) bubble. Starting with a five part series in the San Jose Mercury News, it was picked up by alternative papers, and of course local TV news teams. I saw a piece from the Guardian on this list. A few figures from some of the reports: the downturn was one of the worst in U.S. history (for this area) with a loss of 400,000 or 11% of the jobs. Public companies in Silicon Valley lost $2 trillion or 2/3s of their traded value, and according to a report from UCLA there will be minimum growth for this region in the coming year. One woman, Lynn Gold, formerly of Netscape, now working at a lesser-paying job, commented that missed the bubble: she is "nostalgic for days when she could afford long vacations to Australia or $12,000 for her dog to have brain surgery." Last Friday I happened to be walking along the street in downtown Palo Alto when a television news truck pulled up, and a middle-aged man clutching a mike jumped out. A woman toting a video camera followed. My friend recognized him from the news broadcasts and spoke with him. It turned out he was doing a story on what it was like during the dot-com boom ...and bust. We talked on camera for about ten minutes. Mike, now at a forecasting firm, related the grand parties at Apple (not really related to the Internet bubble), and I spoke of the times I laid off (made redundant) some of my staff a few months before it was my turn. However, the real watershed event for me was the conference <http://www.balie.nl/tulipomania/> organized in Amsterdam in June 2000 by Lovink, Kluitenberg, Stalder, Byfield and others from this list. Being invited to present at Tulipomania gave me the excuse to talk with people here in Silicon Valley who had benefitted from the boom (up until early 2000, anyway), and it helped me prepare my talk on "The Dark Side of Silicon Valley." Considering that the conference was planned before the crash and took place shortly after the NASDQ peaked and then crashed, I think the planners were very prescient. This region is still hoping for another wave to come and bring new innovation and wealth. We have had semi-conductors, then the personal computer, networking and the Internet, and now there is some activity from wireless, homeland security, and biotech, but most people doubt any of these will match the craziness of the Internet bubble. Steve Cisler sacisler@yahoo.com March 15, 2005 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net