SESSION 4: EXERCISES FOR DISCUSSION AND FINAL TASK
WHERE IT ALL STARTED: SILICON VALLEY
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the American high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States and the world, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading hub for high-tech innovation and development, accounting for 1/3 of all of the venture capital investment in the United States. Geographically, the Silicon Valley encompasses all of the Santa Clara Valley including the city of San Jose (and adjacent communities), the southern Peninsula, and the southern East Bay.
Origin of the term
The term Silicon Valley was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a Central California entrepreneur. Its first published use is credited to Don Hoefler, a friend of Vaerst's, who used the phrase as the title of a series of articles in the weekly trade newspaper Electronic News. The series, entitled "Silicon Valley in the USA," began in the paper's issue dated January 11, 1971. Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, while Silicon refers to the high concentration of companies involved in the semiconductor (silicon is used to create most semiconductors commercially) and computer industries that were concentrated in the area. These firms slowly replaced the orchards which gave the area its initial nickname, the Valley of Heart's Delight.
History
Since the early twentieth century, Silicon Valley has been home to an electronics industry. The industry began through experimentation and innovation in the fields of radio, television, and military electronics. Stanford University, its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the development of this area.
A powerful sense of regional solidarity accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. From the 1890s, Stanford University's leaders saw its mission as service to the West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient indigenous local industry. Thus, regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of the area's high-tech firms for the first fifty years of Silicon Valley's development.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Frederick Terman, as Stanford's dean of engineering and provost, encouraged faculty and graduates to start their own companies. He is credited with nurturing Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, and other high-tech firms, until what would become Silicon Valley grew up around the Stanford campus. Terman is often called "the father of Silicon Valley."
During 1955-85, solid state technology research and development at Stanford University followed three waves of industrial innovation made possible by support from private corporations, mainly Bell Telephone Laboratories, Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Xerox PARC. In 1969 the Stanford Research Institute operated one of the four original nodes that comprised ARPANET, predecessor to the Internet.
Social roots of information technology revolution
It was in Silicon Valley that the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor, the microcomputer, among other key technologies, were developed, and has been the site of electronic innovation for over four decades, sustained by about a quarter of a million information technology workers. Silicon Valley was formed as a milieu of innovations by the convergence on one site of new technological knowledge; a large pool of skilled engineers and scientists from major universities in the area; generous funding from an assured market with the Defense Department; the development of an efficient network of venture capital firms; and, in the very early stage, the institutional leadership of Stanford University.
The rise of software
Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.
Internet bubble
Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the dot-com bubble which started from the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time, Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.
Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006 The Wall Street Journal story found that 13 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley. San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents.
Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley. Among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000:
Adobe Systems
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Apple Inc.
Cisco Systems
eBay
Hewlett-Packard
Yahoo
You Tube
According to a 2008 study by AeA in 2006, Silicon Valley was the third largest high-tech center (cybercity) in the United States, behind the New York metropolitan area and Washington metropolitan area, with 225,300 high-tech jobs. The Bay Area as a whole however, of which Silicon Valley is a part, would rank first with 387,000 high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area, with 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers. Silicon Valley has the highest average high-tech salary at $144,800. Largely a result of the high technology sector, the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area has the most millionaires and the most billionaires in the United States per capita.
The region is the biggest high-tech manufacturing center in the United States.
DISCUSSION: Here are some questions you can try asking yourself before you come to our discussion on Wednesday. Remember to see the videos and read the texts:
- Steve Jobs tells us three stories in the video. Can you remember them?
- The first story is about 'Connecting the Dots'. He says he didn´t graduate at College, do you know why? How long did he stay in Reed College.
- Graduation is very important in the USA, did this stop him in his career?
- He describes Macinthosh as the first computer with beautiful typography. Do you think a beautiful typography is important in a computer?
- What does he mean when he titles his first story 'Connecting the Dots' and the fact that you cannot connect the dots looking forward, but you can only connect them looking backwards?
- His second story is titled 'Love and Loss'. He talks about his being fired at the age of 30. Can you remember how it happened?
- He talks about creating NeXT and Pixar, and he mentions Toy Story. Have you seen the film? He describes it as the first computer animated picture and Pixar as the most successful animated studio in the world. Do you agree with him? What do you know about Pixar?
- In his third story he says 'keep looking and don´t settle.' 'Don´t lose faith, you got to find what you love. Don´t settle.' Do you agree with this statement?
- Do you remember the question he asks himself in front of the mirror every day?: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I wanna do what I´m about to do today?' How does he answer? When does he know he needs to change something?
- He says: 'remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. ... There is no reason not to follow your heart.' Do you agree with this statement?
- His final wish is: 'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.' What does he mean by this? Do you agree with him?
PREPARING A DISCUSSION IS FUNDAMENTAL:
THIS MUST BE DONE IN TWO DIRECTIONS:
FIRST, YOU NEED TO LEARN NEW VOCABULARY AND EXPRESSIONS THAT YOU WILL HAVE TO USE FOR THE DISCUSSION.
SECONDLY, YOU HAVE TO PREPARE THE TOPIC BY LOOKING UP INFORMATION IN THE INTERNET, BOOKS, ENCYCLOPAEDIAS.
THIS WAY YOU WILL FEEL MUCH MORE CONFIDENT AND AT THE SAME TIME YOU WILL HAVE MUCH MORE TO TALK ABOUT.
FINAL TASK:
HERE IS ONE FINAL TASK THAT YOU MAY DO IN ORDER TO COVER THE FOUR SKILLS YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON WHEN LEARNING A LANGUAGE: LISTENING, READING, SPEAKING AND WRITING.
Write a composition and leave it in the blog as a comment to Session 4, I will edit it in the blog so that everybody can learn from other people´s opinions. Choose one of these two options:
- Do you believe Steve Jobs's career is a good example for future entrepreneurs?
- His final words of advice to future graduates at the Stanford Commencement Speech were: 'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.' Express your opinion.
Silicon Valley and Steve Jobs are a very good example of success, an aim all of us want to achieve in their life but just a few get. There are three things you need to achieve it, attitude, aptitude and favourable destiny.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, Mr. Jobs talked about joining dots as an action you only can do looking back at the past and that is what everybody does but not always they arrive where they had intended, your physical and psychological capacity and the good or back luck you have in your life draw this dots which you lead to an unknown future.
Also he talked about love for things that you do and living your life each day as that day was the last one, of course this attitude is very positive but useless if he had not been adopted and had stayed with his biological mother living another kind of life, or imagine he had been born in Somalia, for example, maybe we would not probably be talking about him.
On the contrary, I think one thing is sure, success and failure are part of the same place and this place has pyramidal shape with a few of successful people on the top and millions of losers down in the base.
Nowadays, we are suffering one of the deepest crisis we have ever seen. Although there have been people who have known how to achieve their goals, there are other ones who have not had the possibility to reach their dreams because of the lack of opportunities in their lives.
ReplyDeleteAccording to everything we are reading and watching about Job’s live, he seems to achieve his dreams with lots of effort and imagination. It is really difficult what he managed to do in this short period of time. He says that his past experiences and knowledge had helped him to lead this great companies. He used to use his imagination to develop new projects and new devises as well and his past experiences were really useful. For instance, he had to stay in friends’ bedrooms sleeping on the floor or selling empty bottles in order to get money to eat. That is the reason why he mentioned the words – stay hungry, stay foolish- in his speech.
On the other hand, it is really easy to tell it when you have a huge amount of money in your bank account. Despite having spent difficult moments in his live, it seems as if he were very lucky because all his businesses were completely successful. Besides, every new idea they had, it was developed in countries like China and other Asian countries, where salaries are very low so they can produce their products in cheaper ways that if they were produced in other countries where human being rights are respected.
In conclusion, this expression shows us how he developed several ideas living in difficult situations. But when he got fame and money, I am sure his thoughts were completely different and with the help of other people his work could be done more easily and his profits rose quickly too.
Miguel Ruano.
After watching the video where Steve Jobs appears giving a lecture to Standford University students, I have no other choice but to say that what he said was good for the students’ lives and it is good for the rest of people', because at the end of each story there is a moral plenty of common sense.
ReplyDeleteFuture entrepreneurs should take example of Steve Jobs’ thoughts and ideas because he has been able to design and to built wonderful electronic devices, which not only worked like they were planed if they were also aesthetically small works of art in themselves.
If somebody wants to create this kind of things, he or she will need to apply a total commitment like that Steve Jobs showed us. Obviously, who wants to try to create beautiful objects, which are going to change our consumer habits and, probably, this objects are going to try our life easier, he or she must have some things in common with the founder of Apple.
To sum up, Steve Jobs’s career is an ongoing example of tenacity and perseverance, in which we live believing in what we do every day of life and where every obstacle becomes a new challenge that must be overcome.