Silicon Valley some fifty plus years ago was an interesting
place. Mostly Defense related stuff, Lockheed, TRW etc., and lots of people in
short sleeve shirts, ties and pocket protectors reflecting whatever identity
they wanted besides their picture ID cards. No sweat shirts, expensive T
shirts, hoodies and the like, some even worse a sports jacket.
Houses were not that expensive and 101 was a bit crowded at
rush hour but otherwise driveable. Then wave after wave occurred. Defense stuff
moved elsewhere, and in came the chip types, then the system types and slowly
creeping in were the software types. Each type was truly different and that is
a study unto itself. The 80s in the Valley had dozens of telecom systems types,
epitomized by Cisco and some large scale software types like Oracle. Their
customers were large enterprises. People did not buy a Cisco product nor an
Oracle product, companies did.
Then came the “dot com” folks. The door opened for the
consumer with the likes of “pets.com” and others, and then the collapse. Most
likely too much and too early. After the fall the opening was created for the
current batch. Seeing from the failure of their predecessors, and picking up
valuable pieces comes Google, at first a “do no harm” entity, and then
Facebook, if one believes the tale alleged it was a ruthless battle of
accretion.
From the NY Times we have[1]:
Two days after Donald
J. Trump won the 2016 election, executives at Google consoled their employees
in an all-staff meeting broadcast around the world. “There is a lot of fear
within Google,” said … the company’s chief executive, according to a video of
the meeting viewed by The New York Times. When asked by an employee if there
was any silver lining to Mr. Trump’s election, the Google co-founder … said,
“Boy, that’s a really tough one right now.” …. the finance chief, said Mr.
Trump’s victory felt “like a ton of bricks dropped on my chest.” Then she
instructed members of the audience to hug the person next to them.
How about that “sexual harassment” stuff? What if I did not
want to be touched by another or worse yet hugged? Who would they then blame?
It sounds in my opinion like a cult organization. Would the engineers at Ford
Aerospace do this when Nixon was elected? Their only interest was continued DOD
funding. So who “funds” Google and Facebook? The customer there is the folks who
may have very well voted for the person they are now fearing. Does anyone see a
logical break here?
Perhaps these darlings of the Valley should expand their
reach. Really, out to the heart land. I saw what they did in Cambridge, drove
out any parking spaces for the academics and drove the parking rates from
$11.00 per day to almost $60.00! Why, well they seem in my opinion to want
their own world. This world has its own rules, and as if a religion, these
rules can be enforced only by an Inquisition.
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