Silicon Insider: Signs of Life in the Valley
May 15 -- It certainly isn't the weather.
This has been the worst Silicon Valley spring in recent memory. It's an El Niño year, which comes along about once every decade, just rare enough for us to forget the particulars. We always remember the winter storms — the fallen trees, the demolished fences, the landslides and floods — but we tend to forget the miserable springs.
Typically, in the Bay Area, we see the last rain in March, watch the hills turn brown in May and spend early October in terror of wildfires. The welcome rain reappears in late October just in time to soak Halloween costumes.
This is the meteorological rhythm of our lives.
Then El Niño comes around and turns everything upside down. It is now May and as I write this it is still raining. The hills are still green. Which means that everybody has a cold or sinus infection or a nasty hacking cough, except when the sun comes out and everybody explodes with hay fever. Meanwhile, there have been so many rain-outs over at the local baseball diamond that my two boys are going to be spending Saturdays in June playing quadruple-header make-up games.
Did I mention that everybody around here is suffering from low-grade depression? It's so bad that we're actually stopping at stop signs and allowing other people to merge on the freeway.
All of this would suggest that the economic gloom that has filled this Valley for the last two years is heavier and bleaker than ever. After all, it's been one whammy after another: the dot-com bust, the stock market crash, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, just as everything finally started looking better, here comes SARS: a few days ago an airliner suspected of carrying an infected passenger was quarantined at the end of runway at San Jose International.
All the more reason to shuffle back to bed with a bottle of Jack Daniels and not come out until after the All-Star Break.
And yet, despite every reason to be despondent, the last month has suddenly brought unexpected first glimpses of good times just ahead.
Signs of Life
Nothing earth-shattering, mind you. No Macintosh introduction or Netscape IPO; that is, the kind of stunning announcement that sends the ground spinning with the realization that the next revolution is underway. Rather, it has been a series of small, discrete events that together suggest that the underlying forces driving Silicon Valley and the tech world that have been bottled up for the last six months by the constraints of larger geopolitical events, can no longer be denied. They are beginning to bust out.
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