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	Phil's Blogservations Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Posted by philgomes 5:24 PM A Skewed Perspective In Silicon Valley Neville points me to this post from Michael Arrington, who argues that things are good — maybe too good — in the region I call my "career home": Silicon Valley. I left Silicon Valley at the peak of the insanity last time around, and I was pleasantly surprised when I returned in 2005 to see so much goodwill and community surrounding innovation. Now, it’s just like the old days again, and Silicon Valley is no longer any fun. Read the rest of it. I'm sure that his heart was in the right place when he wrote it, anyway. But I have to be honest... While it's abundantly clear that Michael prefers his correspondents to be of the pleading, fawning, starstruck, and obsequious variety (e.g., "More than once I've had a CEO break down and cry on the phone when we said we weren’t covering them." DEAR GOD, IS THAT BRAGGING!?!), let me just say that I'm guessing there's a lot in this post for dyed-in-the-wool Valley types to take issue with. Why? Well, first someone seriously needs to level-set Michael about "the old days" of Silicon Valley. He means well, but he's talking as if the defining moment of the region was the brief period in the late 1990s when people thought they could be rich beyond the dreams of avarice with the simple formula "We're gonna take [x] and put it on the Web." A well-known aphorism about standing on the shoulders of giants comes to mind. It's kind of like how travelers to the U.S. from Egypt must feel when Americans marvel at, say, the place in Monterey where Jimi Hendrix famously burned his guitar on stage. "Big deal," they might say. "My house back in Egypt is three city blocks from where THE PHARAOH'S SISTER FOUND MOSES ADRIFT IN THE @#$%ING NILE!!" Will someone please buy Michael a copy of Freiberger & Swain's Fire In The Valley, Sporck's Spinoff, Markoff's What The Dormouse Said, or Malone's The Microprocessor: A Biography? Quick... Someone run over to Michael's desk and ask him if he even knows who Robert Noyce, Jack Kilby, Doug Engelbart, or William Shockley are before he has time to fire up Wikipedia. Some perspective: When the dot-bust happened, I had just gone out on my own — one of the tech PR folks who did so by choice — and helped create a micro-consultancy with a few people I had worked with previously. More than once, even without a paying client to our name the first three months, we looked at each other around the kitchen table that served as our conference room and said, "Isn't it great that the tourists have all gone home?" Michael is at least trying to say the same thing in his post. The issue here is that he runs the tour bus and is wearing the headset mic hooked up to the PA. Sure, great services like Meebo and Sphere "literally launched" in his living room. However, I'm not convinced that he's fostering or even valuing the "spirit of the garage" that blessed the likes of Mssrs. Hewlett, Packard, Jobs, or Wozniak. It used to be that Silicon Valley had a powerful and unique, if sometimes insular, kind of reverence for its own history. I'd be sorry to see that go away. The core problem (echoed here by DigitalTrends chief Ian Bell) is that I don't think Michael surrounds himself enough with the right people or, based on what I've read on TechCrunch, is too terribly interested in a broader view what the Valley is all about. He's got the venture capital part down — a key component of what made the Valley the economic miracle it became — but viewing the Valley through that lens (or any lens with that degree of near-exclusivity) only delivers a cloudy, funhouse-mirror image. Oh... And about sending him those books... A copy of the Fire In The Valley is already on its way... For the coffeetable in the living room. Technorati Tags: techcrunch, silicon valley | HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil's demented imagination. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even Phil disagrees with what he thinks sometimes. This site has virtually no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Clicking on a link doesn't automatically send a 1/2-cent donation to UNICEF. You can't buy, sell, auction, swap, find a date, win friends, influence people, cross the chasm, or decode the human genome using this site. You won't get free email. You won't win a PalmOne Treo or a Playstation2. This site will not end world hunger, foster peace in the Middle East, help you smell better, teach you how to swing dance, or move the global economy from petroleum to hydrogen fuels. You'll learn a lot about this site's master, though, which amounts to a haphazard collection of strange and useless facts that pretty much won't help you at all.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This is the blog of Phil Gomes, VP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes.com View my page on PROpenMic SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. 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