Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

1. What is it?

   • Nickname for the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States.
   • The "Silicon" part of the name refers to the high concentration of companies involved in the making of semiconductors.
   • The capital and largest city is San Jose

2. Why is it so important?

   • It is home to many of the world's largest high-tech corporations
     • Adobe
     • Apple
     • Cisco
     • Ebay
     • Yahoo
     • Google
     • Facebook
     • Amazon
     • Pixar
     • Microsoft
     • The first electronics company established in Silicon Valley was Hewlett-Packard

3. Watch "Pirates of Silicon Valley" by Martyn Burke

   • Brief history of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
   • How Apple and Microsoft was born

4. First called "Silicon Valley" in 1971 by a local newsletter writer, Donald C. Hoefler

5. Foreign competition, especially from Japan, caused perhaps the greatest problems for Silicon Valley.

   • Silicon Valley had begun to worry about Japanese competition by the late 1970s. In 1981, U.S. companies controlled 51.4 percent of the world's semiconductor market; Japan's share was 35.5 percent.
     • Within seven years the figures had virtually reversed themselves, with Japan at 51 percent and the United States 36.5 percent.