By ROBERT TRIGAUX
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 26, 2001
My dot-com done come and gone.
The wheels came off and it didn't take long.
All that venture capital's spent,
And our Web site didn't even make a cent.
-- Lyrics to My Dot-Com, by Silicon Valley song writers Rick Glaze and David Pace.
At The Grill in downtown San Jose, Calif., fewer people order $34.50 porterhouse steaks and $150 bottles of wine.
In recent months, moves out of the San Jose/San Francisco area using U-Haul outnumbered moves in by 12.7 percent to 43 percent, depending on the city at the other end of the move.
Since the technology-driven Nasdaq stock index peaked on March 10, 2000, Northern California's 100 largest publicly held technology companies have lost about two-thirds of their combined market value, wiping out an astounding $2-trillion in shareholder wealth, an Associated Press analysis shows.
In California's Silicon Valley, the gold rush is over.
Hallelujah.
Maybe it's time Tampa Bay and a few dozen other tech-wannabe metro areas stop bowing and scraping to the once-invincible mecca of the new economy.
The Tampa Bay area will never be Silicon Valley -- thankfully. The sooner states and cities (and a few countries) drop the groupie routine and stop trying to come up with some snappy "Silicon" nickname, the better.
The Tampa Bay area once tossed around the name Silicon by the Bay. Part of southern Manhattan is Silicon Alley. Louisiana likes Silicon Bayou. Ireland's taken Silicon Bog. Phoenix is partial to Silicon Desert. Virginia's keen on Silicon Dominion. Seattle and Portland are vying for Silicon Forest.
Austin, Texas, prefers Silicon Hills. Suburban Boston is toying with Silicon Necklace. And parts of Midwestern states from Texas north to Nebraska want to latch on to Silicon Prairie.
Dozens of other silly Silicon names -- Silicon Tundra and Silicon Vineyard among them -- are floating about.
Give us a Silicon break.
Whether tech is up or down, Silicon Valley still offers plenty of insight into how to cultivate and grow a technology industry.
But let's get past our economic hat-in-hand trips to Silicon Valley, these gee-whiz pilgrimages that smack of Gomer Pyle Goes to the Big Tech City. Even a planned pilgrimage to Austin, Texas, that lesser San Jose, by bay area business leaders now seems ill-timed.
Semiconductors! Gol-ly!
Carol Cassara is that rare person who knows Silicon Valley and the Tampa Bay area firsthand. She is an executive with Tampa's Tucker/Hall public relations company who happens to operate out of the company's 18-month-young office in San Jose.
Cassara, who earlier worked at San Jose disk-drive manufacturer Maxtor Corp., says the Tampa Bay area seems to be getting over the myth of Silicon Valley as some Olympian home to the tech gods.
"I think everyone is less ga-ga over the big new economy," Cassara says. "Maybe there was a new economy during the dot-com hype. But the new new economy looks suspiciously like the old economy," she says and laughs. "Go figure."
Look at the evidence.
In Silicon Valley and San Francisco, the number of unemployed people soared from 29,400 in December to 85,600 in July.
The region's three largest tech companies -- Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, Intel Corp. of Santa Clara and Oracle Corp. of Redwood Shores -- have watched $686-billion of stock value evaporate in the past 17 months. Cisco's market value alone has shrunk by $342-billion.
In the spring, a top official at one of Silicon Valley's biggest law firms, Cooley Godward, told a local newspaper that no law firm would lay off lawyers -- even in a downturn -- and risk a hit to its reputation.
On Thursday, Cooley Godward axed 85 of its 645 attorneys, along with 50 support staffers.
It seems disputes over busted deals, deflated valuations and shuttered companies are not fueling quite enough demand for legal advice. Other law firms may downsize as well.
"The valley has gone from exuberance to spookiness," says Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck's Woodside, a restaurant famous for the dealmaking done over pancake breakfasts. "I personally haven't been affected, but so many people I know are wrapped up emotionally and financially."
Consider the poor folks at Autodesk. The major maker of computer-aided design software in June ended its 17-year tradition of providing a Friday afternoon beer bust for its work-hard, play-hard programmers. The reason: cost cutting.
Add weak commercial real estate to the mix. Office rents fell in major U.S. cities during the second quarter, led by huge drops in downtown San Francisco and San Jose, says a study last week by CB Richard Ellis National Real Estate Index. The study blamed the precipitous fall on failed dot-coms and canceled corporate expansion plans.
Under so much stress, how fares the famous Silicon Valley ego?
Since the Internet bubble burst last year, what once was Brobdingnagian in size has withered. Now it is merely huge.
"Silicon Valley's business culture has flopped from turbo-testosterone into the passive voice," a recent Business Week story says.
This is all for the good. Silicon Valley will slowly stabilize and prosper at more moderate levels of expectation. And areas such as Tampa Bay will spend less time drooling over a demythologized Silicon Valley.
When Cassara flies into the Tampa Bay area to meet with her bosses and clients, she sees a region that still manages to maintain some small-town feel, that still offers affordable property, that still provides some sense of community.
She also sees a metro area with plenty of infrastructure challenges ("That 275 traffic can rival Silicon Valley's"), including the availability of water (a key ingredient in semiconductor manufacturing) and upgrading the educated work force (we're not quite Stanford and UC-Berkeley).
In Silicon Valley, the worker mantra is more basic. How is my company doing? Does it make money? What's today's stock price?
"In Silicon Valley," Cassara says, "money is king." Money and a parking spot.
That's why Rick Glaze and David Pace, the Silicon Valley song writers who penned the My Dot-Com lyrics at the start of this column, are keeping their day jobs. Glaze is an investment manager. Pace is a Santa Clara University photography professor.
Their lyrics catch the scene just right.
You can't imagine why I'm feeling so low.
I just lost a fortune on my first IPO.
A horrible meltdown, it was carnage at my feet.
Porsches and Beemers lay abandoned in the street.
-- Information from Times wires was used in this column. Robert Trigaux can be reached at
trigaux@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.