Silicon Valley: mixed signals for the future
Published: 11 Feb 2005 15:15 GMT
What would you do as the first one or two or three steps to improve the Silicon Valley economy, the high-tech economy? Is it the quality-of-life stuff that you would focus on?
Yeah, I would. I may be an outlier. But I would.
Give me an example what would you do.
Housing would be the Number one thing. If you went to talk to the city of San Jose and the economic development people, they got it. People around here are rezoning voluntarily. (They are taking) industrial research and development land that wouldn't be built until 2050, and putting in housing there. Every time they build a house, they help with the price. They say, "You can locate in Silicon Valley, and we've got more workers now, (and) they don't have to commute three hours."
So housing becomes a very important part of the competition. So does making sure that all of the schools are good. So wherever your workers locate in the region, their kids are going to a good school. It's important. And transportation -- we have to have world-class mobility and world-class places to live because we're trying to compete for the best and the brightest. We are not competing for the stuff that's going to Arkansas.
Do you worry about the notion that the tech industry has gotten lot of negative press over the past couple of years? People have heard about the offshoring stuff, the dot-com bust and high rates of unemployment in the tech field. Do you think there is a need for the tech industry to almost have a public-relations campaign to get people interested?
No. California just passed the stem cell funding initiative. Everybody got really excited, and we all kind of "got it" that way. I think the excitement comes back the minute you do something tangible. We may not have the levels of job growth that we had before, but that's a productivity phenomenon. Google was exciting.
Even the space efforts, I imagine, can generate interest.
Yeah. And there's a big nanotech initiative at NASA here that the congressmen got funded. We could be the nanotech centre and the stem cell centre.
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