As Silicon Valley becomes more universally recognized, recently more and more news articles from CNN, Wall street Journal, Fortune and others have started to insinuate that San Francisco is Silicon Valley. San Francisco's economy was, is and will always be built on finance and tourism. San Francisco does have a growing start-up based Hi-tech sector, but so do Austin, Seattle and So-Cal, we do not
call them Silicon Valley. San Francisco is 50 miles, two counties and two International Airports away from Silicon Valley. This is even more annoying when the city located in the Center of the Valley,
San Jose, the 10th largest city in the US, which provides the most infrastructure to Silicon Valley Companies and is home to Hi-tech heavy weights Ebay, Cisco, Samsung and Adobe is almost always ignored in these same articles. Fact: 90% of Silicon Valley companies are within a 35 mile radius of downtown San Jose. Why is this happening, I suspect it is a combination of reasons, basic laziness to learn the historical facts, belief that readers are ignorant of San Jose or the reason is for the reporters benefit.( I will elaborate on this later) Whatever the reason, it is no excuse for creating a story that fails to inform factually. This Page was created in response to bad reporting and fact gathering from the National media in respect to the way Silicon valley's is being portrayed. Silicon Valley was a term created to refer to the massive collection of Hi-tech companies within Santa Clara Valley (The San Jose Metropolitan Statistical Area)
Everybody in Silicon Valley, be it Reporters, Business leaders, Historians or Government officials knows this. Yes, Silicon Valley's High concentration of companies and campuses continues to grow and have pushed into San Mateo county on the peninsula and Alameda county in the east bay. Also of note Geographiclally and culturally SF and San Jose are very different. San Jose's in the Valley and it is a sprawling suburban city of many different districts Freeways crisscross palm trees and warm weather abound and feels more like Southern California than Northern California were as SF is cool and very foggy in spring and summer the city. SF is only 49 square miles of land and it is very urbanized. It's mass transit is actually utilized and a necessity. Politics wise SF tends to be much more ultra liberal than San Jose which tends to be liberal also but more pragmatic. As for why I believe it is a benefit for some national media reporters to refer to San Francisco as Silicon Valley is simple. Traditionally SF was and is the Bay Areas Media Center, 25 years ago when SF was a bigger city than San Jose this made sense but San Jose's population surpassed SF and it's metro area has grown into the economic engine of the Bay Area. It seems the SF media elite find it hard to share any national spotlight. Locally we talk about the Manhattan-ization of SF and the Los Angeles-ation of San Jose and lets face it, The media likes hip Manhattan more than suburban LA and if reporters can stretch Silicon Valley's boundaries 50 miles north to include San Francisco they can justify being stationed there instead of less iconic San Jose, Even if San Jose has a 5 times more tech companies & is right in Silicon Valley. Portraying San Francisco as Silicon Valley while ignoring San Jose is the same as saying "Hollywood is in San Diego while ignoring Los Angeles. This is not only ridiculous but it is misleading and fraudulent. I have worked in three different fields in the Valley tech sector over the last 22 years. I have lived in SF for 9 years and truly loved it but, as a Valley native I can not see this continue. I am tired of cringing when national media articles read " San Francisco's Silicon Valley"
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Here are some basic facts about San Jose and Silicon Valley. I have started posting in the comments section of web articles that contain embellishments or misleading statements concerning Silicon Valley:
90% of Silicon Valley companies are within a 35 mile radius of downtown San Jose. San Jose has over one million persons. San Jose Metro Area has over 2 million. San Francisco is scenically beautiful and has a young and relatively new high tech community but it is not Silicon Valley. Metro San Jose's main industry is Hi-tech. Its history is technology whether it was the IBM facility in south San Jose in the 1950's, (Intel,AMD) micro-chips in the 1960's, 1st generation video games in the 80's (Pong, Atari, Activision), Internet hardware in the 90's(Cisco) you name it Web retail (Ebay)
Software (Adobe).Consumer (Apple, Netflix) tech is rooted in San Jose like no place else in the world. Silicon Valley is located in the San Jose Metropolitan Area. Silicon Valley's International Airport is located in north San Jose very close to Downtown. Silicon Valley's Newspaper is the San Jose Mercury News. Silicon Valley's Museum of technology is in downtown San Jose. Silicon Valley's Swankiest Shopping Center is in San Jose (Santana Row)
Silicon Valley's chamber of commerce is the San Jose/Silicon Valley Chamber. Silicon Valley's Business Newspaper is The San Jose Business Journal Not the SF Business times. San Jose is the nations 10th largest city and the cultural, population and urban center of Silicon Valley, These are all facts.
