Word: silicon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Silicon Valley: the place is synonymous with bright ideas, fresh fortunes and sunny forecasts. But right now the mood in this region 40 miles southeast of San Francisco suggests a name like Gloomy Gulch. Gone are the days when development spread like brush fire across the region and upstart businesses leaped from garages to the FORTUNE 500. Absent are the fuzzy-cheeked genius entrepreneurs, the companies hungry for workers and a city so wealthy it once considered giving back $1 million in tax revenues to its citizens. Says Lawrence Stone, a city councilman in Sunnyvale, which no longer...
Today the double whammy of a lingering U.S. recession and a maturing of high-tech industries has made life in Silicon Valley considerably less buoyant. Employment, profits and housing prices are down, traffic congestion is up, and the occasional layer of smog now looms overhead. "The vision we've had about this place has changed," says Stone. "Economically, we're a region at risk." In what is probably the ultimate indignity, some residents say the area is becoming like Los Angeles. "The Valley," notes Thomas Mandel, a futurist for the consulting firm SRI, "is going through a mid-life crisis...
...From late 1984 to early 1986, the region lost nearly 33,000 jobs, or 4% of the work force. Just a year later, those jobs and more were reclaimed when a surge of new products and an infusion of venture capital helped rekindle the region's growth. Regis McKenna, Silicon Valley's pre-eminent marketing consultant, says he has seen half a dozen recessions in his 31 years in the Valley. "Every three years we go through these cyclical changes," he says. "In the course of them, people predict that the Valley is changing or coming...
...somewhere around Monterey. But Stan Statham, a Republican assemblyman from far-north Redding, wants more radical surgery. He would draw the border above Sacramento for a new 51st state called Northern California. But that would leave most of the state's economic hubs -- including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley -- in the new state to the south. Hey Stan, whose side...
...ECONOMY: Silicon Valley slumps into a wrenching mid-life crisis...