So Long, Silicon Valley

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Contributing Business Writer

Collette McKenna Parker

September 4, 2008

Has the process of the big fish (like Cisco) eating up all the little fish (start-ups with innovative ideas) doomed Silicon Valley and the greater U.S. to incremental technology growth – rather than large-scale change-the-Earth ideas?
 
So laments Judy Estrin, former chief technology officer of Cisco, in her new book, “Closing the Innovation Gap.”
 
“Ms. Estrin traces Silicon Valley’s troubles to the tech boom. She said that’s when entrepreneurs and venture capitalists started focusing more on starting companies to turn around and sell them and less on building successful companies for the long term,” writes Claire Cain Miller in her New York Times Bits blog.
 
“Ms. Estrin acknowledged that innovative ideas still appear all over Silicon Valley. But, she said, the technologies at the root of new products like Apple’s iPod or the Facebook social networking service were actually developed several decades ago. If entrepreneurs do not continue to develop groundbreaking technology, she said, the valley would be in dire straits in another decade. She compared the situation to a tree that appears to be growing well, but whose roots are rotting underground,” Miller continues.
 
Read Miller’s blog at http://blogs.bnet.com/business-books/?p=285&tag=nl.e713  and consider whether Atlanta is guilty of building start-ups for sale.

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