Silicon Valley has been the driving force of the technology revolution for decades. It began with the genesis of the chip industry and Fairchild Semiconductors. It was helped by the talent that flowed from the Universities of Stanford and Berkeley, and by the local presence of technical giant Hewlett-Packard. The PC industry was spawned there by Apple and eventually dominated by the Silicon Valley giant, Intel. The database industry grew there with local companies Oracle, Ingres, Informix and Sybase. Sun Microsystems was raised there. The Internet bloomed there, with Netscape, Cisco, Yahoo!, eBay and the rest, coming from nowhere. It was all heady stuff.

But now the Valley is in a malaise. People are referring to it as Death Valley. Fortunes have been lost and there is financial distress amongst the tech workers. The value of stock options has not only melted away, but many unfortunates are left with huge tax bills on shares that they never converted into cash and whose value no longer covers the tax bill. The people who have born the brunt of this are not so much the executives, many of whom understood that money is money, shares are volatile and stock options are a theoretical bonus. It was the young tech workers in their twenties, many of whom never even got to buy Ferrari’s or expensive. Such people are mobile and will now go wherever the opportunity is, carrying their tax bills with them.

There is emigration of entrepreneurs in progress from the Valley. Some are going back to India, China and other places in the Far East from whence many of them came. VC money for technology ventures is now hard to come by in the Valley and it isn’t cheap. So some are looking to more fertile geographical areas in which to apply their talents and invest the wealth they were able to hold on to.

So the question now is whether Silicon Valley is losing its grip. The Valley may have been born with the rise of Fairchild, but it only became the heart of the IT industry when the high tech area around MIT in Massachusetts gradually lost its premier position in the 1980s. (Remember Digital, Wang, Data General and the rest). This kind of geographical shift could happen again. There have been suggestions that it could move to Texas (Houston or Austin) or perhaps to Chicago in the US. Some have suggested that it might move to Scandinavia, which is currently leading the world in mobile technology, or to London where there is a rapidly growing media industry. And then there are the possibilities of China and India, where local software industries are on the rise.

Such things are difficult to predict. Nobody predicted that a revolution in Pop music would emerge from Liverpool in the early 1960s and pervade the UK for years.