Headline Dec 22, 2015/ ''' *LONG LIVE IMAGINATION* : SILICON VALLEY '''

''' *LONG LIVE IMAGINATION* : 

SILICON VALLEY '''

IN 2011, after decades in which Silicon Valley had seemed to care no more about its surroundings than about its clothes, Steve Jobs announced-

He had hired Sir Norman Foster to design a vast new Apple headquarters. Facebook soon commissioned an equally massive building from Frank Gehry.

Google followed suit, along with Amazon, up north. As the tech industry finally turned its attention to architecture, its imagination just soared.

THE STARK TRUTH is,.... that over all these many decades, American start-ups, and technology companies dominated the world space of need and progress.

The rest of the world, had just about no contribution to make, till now. !WOW!  -the World Students Society and its  ''eco-system'',  is your best chance to compete for great accomplishments and honours.

Let's hope this inference is not lost on the students of the world, So, join up and lead the world. 

BUT whatever its architectural shortcomings, the new headquarters clearly represent Amazon's intention to cast its lot firmly with the city -where it has been located since its founding, in 1994.

In notable contrast to Seattle's huge tech employer, Microsoft, which has been headquartered entirely in suburban Redmond for the past 27 years.

Then again, Redmond is some 16 miles away from downtown Seattle, which has always made it much easier for Microsoft employees to commute from the city than their counterparts in Silicon Valley companies.

Silicon Valley grew up around Stanford University, and until a few years it seemed to have only the most tenuous relationship to San Francisco.

The law firms and venture capital firms that service the  tech industry located themselves along Sand Hill road in Menlo Park, beside Stanford, in quarters that were posher than those of the start-ups but every bit suburban.

YOU CAN DO business anywhere as the success of Silicon Valley proves. But the things a city does offer -

A lively, diverse environment full of visual stimulation, culture, food and all kinds of people  -is exactly what suburbs can't provide, even when they get as rich and as successful as the ones in Silicon Valley.

''As disappointed visitors and new employees discover, Silicon Valley is a dull and ugly landscape of low-rise stucco office parks and immense traffic-clogged boulevards. The fancy restaurants are in strip malls........

There is nothing to do, nowhere to go,'' Layne wrote in the Awl.

It's surely why more and more startups and small to medium-size companies are locating or relocating in San Francisco instead of Silicon Valley. The city itself is a powerful recruiting tool. 

''The younger people want to be in the city,'' Karen Wickre, a veteran of Google who now serves as Twitter's editorial director disclosed. ''I don't miss my nine-year commute to Google.''

[A sign reading, THE HACKER COMPANY,in bright-red neon, was salvaged from a building in Florida and mounted on the facade of the building where Zuckerberg works, a display of wit and irony that you would be hard pressed to find at Apple, or almost anywhere else in Silicon Valley].

The Old Sun buildings, which contained rows of identical cubicles, have been converted into an assemblage of big, open workspaces, cafes, meeting and recreation spaces, with exposed ductwork and concrete floors and a deliberate unfinished air,

It looks, when you get right down to it, like the sorts of things Gehry himself was designing some 20 years ago.

Undoubtedly, both buildings will bring a degree of architectural excitement to Silicon Valley that it has never seen before. But the real question is whether, for all their ambition, they will do much to change the underlying suburban culture.

They are both big, private, sealed-off corporate villas that most people will reach by car. At a time, when the city, not the suburb, seems to hold the allure for younger workers in the technology industry-

How much will Foster's refined,  iPhone like architecture or Gehry's lively, garden-topped workspace matter?

Twitter's renovated office space in an old San Francisco neighborhood may, in the end, be the real harbinger of the future.

The Honour and Serving of this  ''Historic Technology Operational Research'' continues. Thank Ya all for reading and see you on the following one.

With respectful dedication to the United States of America, its great Students, Professors and Teachers. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society:

''' A New World '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless