From the San Francisco Chronicle
Silicon Valley faces an uncertain future — starting with its definition
By Owen Thomas
... When a Chronicle business columnist first tried to describe Silicon Valley in 1973, he struggled for words: “the deep Peninsula electronics cluster” was one formulation, with a tenuous link to geographic reality. Seven years later, in a five-part series called “Silicon Power,” The Chronicle reported that the region was “choking on its own success.”...
“When I first wrote about Silicon Valley, you could safely say that Silicon Valley was just Santa Clara County,” said AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information and author of “Regional Advantage,” an exploration of the area’s rise to tech dominance. “Over the first 30 or 40 years, it has grown to include Fremont, the East Bay, Alameda County, certainly San Francisco in the last 10 years.”...
There are moves afoot to replicate the virtues of Silicon Valley in the Midwest, paired with fretting about the region’s future. Saxenian is skeptical: “I’ve spent a lot of time going around the world to Silicon Whatevers. There’s no other place that has generation after generation of people who have been involved in these industries....
“There is the myth of Silicon Valley,” Saxenian says. “There is something that has become bigger than the physical place in people’s minds, there’s no doubt of that.”
