The history of technology has
time and again shown that
many of today's great
companies have emerged out of rubble. A number of Silicon Valley companies have testified
to this historical truth. The marvelous conglomeration of engineering talent,
entrepreneurial ability, the availability of fund, relentless pursuit for innovation and
technological brilliance and unparalleled high-tech cultural edge in this region have
given birth to many technology behemoths which started as virtual non-entities. For
more than four decades, the region is the nursery for start-up firms and the world's
prolific laboratory for information technology, innovation and basic research. Now, the
Valley, located in the Southern Part of the San Francisco Bay area is the prestigious
home to pioneering companies such as Cisco, Hewlett & Packard, Intel, Google, Apple,
to name a few.
In its noble pursuit of technological brilliance, the region has
repeatedly weathered many upheavals—but it faced all odds valiantly and after
each crisis the region gained in strength, reinvented itself and became more
dedicated to innovation and technology. And, in recent times too, the Valley has
been gripped by the scars of economic slowdown. The present crisis, which
some view as the worst ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has started
to take its toll on the innovation machine of the Valley which led to a spike in
job losses and a decline in commercial property markets in California. Even the
venture capitalists are showing less interest in startup companies—they are
paying increasingly less heed to basic research which has a long gestation lag, and
instead the money they are investing is going into less expensive, less risky deals. |
