Word: silicones
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
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...
From opposite ends of the U.S., they carried on the computer industry's fiercest rivalry. Based in suburban New York, International Business Machines has long looked down on Apple Computer, dismissing it as a ragtag bunch of rabble-rousers. Miles away, in both distance and culture, Silicon Valley-based Apple (1990 revenues: $5.6 billion) attacked IBM ($69 billion) as an impersonal bureaucracy, mocking the company in TV ads as Big Brother and depicting its customers as lemmings. The warring companies forced computer users to choose sides, sometimes dividing family members against one another. Those wanting easy-to-use, almost organic...
When Apple unveiled the revolutionary Macintosh in 1984, the rivalry with IBM reached full boil. Taking on Big Blue had become an obsession for the Silicon Valley boys, who called themselves "Bluebusters." Jobs launched Macintosh with an evangelistic zeal, exhorting an auditorium packed with dealers, customers and employees, "IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry . . .? Was George Orwell right?" As the frenzied crowd shouted a chorus of "No!," Jobs cued a now notorious TV commercial known as "1984," which...