Silicon Insider: The Bangalore Backlash
July 10 -- — High-tech's newest innovation: finding a scapegoat for the turnaround.
Creativity has always been one of Silicon Valley's greatest strengths. New technologies, new products, new companies, new types of organizations. For 50 years, the Valley has led the world in new ideas.
But there is one area in which the Valley has remained recondite in its innovations: casting blame. Corporate greed, the Japanese, the Feds … Silicon Valley's betes noir have always been stock villains cast out of the old striped-pants capitalist playbook. For such a mercurial place, both the blame-casting and the bad guys have been shockingly predictable: every four years, as the chip cycle slumps and the Valley recesses, we seek out something familiar on which to download our problems.
But something has changed. The long boom of the '90s put us out of sync on so many things — apparently now even our bad guys. A year ago, at the bottom of the crash, the Valley was refreshingly honest in its self-appraisal. Sure, we tried to blame corporate greed (hence the absurd class-action lawsuit against dot-coms that was settled last week for a billion bucks) and the Gen-Xers. But in the end, most Valleyites just sort of shook their heads, made an ironic smile and said, "Yeah, well, we all went a little crazy, didn't we?"
It was an unexpected self-appraisal that had the added benefit of being the truth.
But now, just as unexpectedly, as Nasdaq starts to climb, the chip book-to-bill ratio is turning positive, and the Valley is beginning to heat up once again, we've instead started wailing about a new source for all of our problems.
Who is it? Of all people, the Indians.
Keeping the Slice for the USA
Apparently, the greatest threat to America's high-tech dominance is not the shortage of early-stage capital, the onerous tax and regulatory environment, the crappy public education system, the lack of major new national technology initiatives, the Federal obstructions to the widespread installation of broadband, vindictive anti-trust investigations, a rococo patent system or the fact that the latest killer consumer product has yet to appear on the scene. No, the biggest threat to the U.S. technology industry is a small army of code writers in Bangalore, India.
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