I’m spending much of December away from Silicon Valley in Paris and in London. I recently returned from the Le Web conference in Paris and am catching up with family and friends in London.
I find it is always useful in escaping Silicon Valley for a good period of time because it reminds me that we are not all obsessed with the constant discussions about Facebook, Twitter, Android, and all things Apple.
In the outside world people find such subjects interesting but not to the same extent as people seem to do in Silicon Valley. There is a binary mentality to such topics in SIlicon Valley — everything is couched as one versus the other, as one killing the other.
It’s a binary attitude popular in the geek engineering culture yet we know the reality of the world at large is that many things can co-exist without one necessarily “killing” the other.
The real world is not a black and white world it’s a spectrum of many things. It’s an “and” world: iPhone and Android; Apple and Microsoft; Dell and HP, etc. One can exist and so can the other, and create economies of scale and profit for many developers and value for many users.
When you leave the echo chamber of Silicon Valley you get a glimpse of the reality of the wider world but you can’t do this on a flying visit, you need to dig in for a couple of weeks or more, imho.
Tom Foremski is the Editor and Founder of the popular and top-ranked news site Silicon Valley Watcher, reporting on business and culture of innovation. He is a former journalist at the Financial Times and in 2004, became the first journalist from a leading newspaper to resign and become a full-time journalist blogger.
Tom has been reporting on Silicon Valley and the US tech industry since 1984 and has been named as one of the top 50 (#28) most influential bloggers in Silicon Valley. His current focus is on the convergence of media and technology — the making of a new era for Silicon Valley. He also writes a column at ZDNET.
