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Comment by david927 | Hacker News Reader

... seismic hazard in Northern California, where pretty much all the large Internet companies are based, along with a zillion startups. [..] All of these headquarters are going to be shut down for a long time when the Big One comes. You're going to notice it.

What we'll notice is not having filters for the pictures of our Starbucks cups. The demographic of teenage girls in malls will be devastated.

Silicon Valley is no longer the epicenter of technology; it's the epicenter of the fashion of technology.

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Could you explain the phrase "fashion of technology" more?

It sounds like you're making an over-generalization based on the last few years of "social" while overlooking many of the largest tech companies in the world. Apple, Oracle, HP, Cisco, Google, Intel, the list goes on, are all headquartered here. http://www.siliconvalley.com/SV150/ci_25548370/

What made SV great was that it was, up to the 80's, the place where the foundations of technology were created. We've been building on those foundations since then and we've come to the point now where it's clear how frivolous it's become. We can't take it any further so we're adding pastel colors and glitter. It's become a series of fads. The 'great' tech companies of today's SV are no different than the 'great' lines coming out of Milan this season. Both will be gone when winter arrives having added nothing.

It was a poor place to make the comment; it wasn't on topic. My apologies. But when the comment was made that zillions of startups would be wiped out, and that we would notice, I wanted to clarify that we might notice but only in the most superficial way possible. Yes, it's a generalization -- there are always exceptions, and there are large tech companies there, but there are large companies in every major metropolitan area. If HP can't brand laptops for a year, I think we'll somehow manage to all survive.

I made the comment because I wanted to correct what I saw as an antiquated notion: that SV was different from Houston or Singapore. It used to be. It's not anymore.

Your comment is both incorrect and childish and this is actually an important and interesting topic, please don't participate on HN discussions with comments like this.

Comparing the startup scene in silicon valley to fashion is actually very apt. The loss of life and pain would be devastating, but lets not think that a few billion dollars worth of hardware would be anything other than a tax write-off and some middle managers pain to deal with for the next year.

If you want to look at devastating datacenter loss, if anything happened to Northern NJ the markets would go into a tailspin.

your comment is no better than op's. you could provide some examples why his opinion is wrong, because i believe quite a lot of people (myself included) think that most of companies that only exist in silicon valley are about extracting money from markets that are essentially driven by fashion.

You are right, I should have made a better comment or no comment at all.

I'm just tired of the obviously incorrect proposition that Bay Area is producing just frivolous photo sharing and social communication tools (which both has a huge value for humanity, but that's a different story) and I seriously find it an interesting thought experiment what would happen on a global scale if the Bay Area would be devastated by a big earthquake.

The obvious tech giants like Google, Apple, Oracle and Cisco are arguably supporting a huge number of businesses and organizations around the world. But a glance through a list of just publicly traded US SaaS companies reveals that about 40% are from the Bay Area. These offer SaaS-based solutions ranging from HR tools (Workday), IT service monitoring (Splunk), ITMS (ServiceNow), CRMs (SalesForce), ERPs (NetSuite), Insurance backends (Guidewire) to supply chain management (e2open), to just name a few.

If Bay Area suffered anything resembling 2008 Sichuan earthquake, it would halt a good part of the economy for a while.

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