Atlanta vs San Jose (living, state, better, comparison)

[OrlFlaUsa]

Originally Posted by johnatl

Great posts all around from DANNY, OrlFlaUsa & grapico.

I'm just glad my post wasn't misconstrued. Even though I am often accused of being an Atlanta booster, I'm actually more a defender than anything.

You are the best defender of Atlanta I've ever seen sir. Here, I've created a picture of what I think you might look like hanging out in Buckhead on a Friday night

[johnatl]

^LOL, you're crazy!!!!!

[Lifeshadower]

I think your love for San Jose is admirable man, but I think you're also being extremely too one-sided with the history of the Bay Area.

If my thoughts seem disconnected: my apologies.

Originally Posted by DANNYY

Silicon Valley started off in the early 20th century. And it started off with the graduates from Stanford University that started creating broadcast stations for television, radios, and electronics.

Silicon Valley owes its entire historical existence and start up to Stanford University.

Stanford University was started up by a family, parents that wanted to dedicate a school to their son. And to complete his ambition that every child in California are their "children" and to educate them. Stanford University started up in Santa Clara County because it was a rural setting and farm like. The first to school there referred to it as "farm" or "The Farm School".

Silicon Valley and its Tech start up had absolutely nothing to do with San Francisco. In fact it was a series of coincidences that led up to what it is today.
San Jose & Santa Clara County being a farm led it to what it is today, historically the greatest asset to Tech in the world.

The choice to put Stanford University in a detached farm and it becoming the most prosperous school in the West Coast in the early 20th century led way to innovators even back then to invent more tech savvy radios, televisions, and other electronics. Those things weren't invented in the Silicon Valley but they were updated and improved upon there.

I think you're wording this one way too strongly. The reason WHY Stanford put his school where he did was because he still wanted to be relatively close to San Francisco and STILL have access to the peninsular rail line to SF. Remember, Leland Stanford had a huge stakehold on the success of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company


Southern Pacific

Remember, at that time in California history in the pre-Hiram Johnson days, the railroads pretty much owned California. If it was really about putting Stanford away on some non-descript farm, why wouldn't he have built it somewhere in the Central Valley where there is MUCH more land available? Why would it be near a profitable rail-line connecting the Santa Clara farms (growing some of the most profitable crops in the world at the time) to San Francisco? It's not a coincidence. In much of the same way, the reason why USC (my opinion on them shall remain private ) developed in the area it did is because the founded wanted his school to have access to downtown Los Angeles through one of the recently built rail lines.

And let's be real: Stanford wasn't the only game in town. There was this school not too far from SF similarly built in an area that was undeveloped at the time..I think they called it UC Berkeley. You may have heard of it Both schools (Stanford and Berkeley) wouldn't have existed in their current form IF neither were funded by financiers in San Francisco. Both schools have a HUGE part in the way San Francisco and the Bay Area developed, but both owe their prominence BECAUSE of their location relative to San Francisco, not the other way around.

The reason why the Santa Clara Valley developed the way it did had way more to do with government R&D projects (IE: Two World Wars) and cheaper land availability than stuffing the schools into a small compact space in San Francisco. Remember, between the time the Santa Clara Valley switched from being a "farm area" to a "tech area", there was military manufacturing. Everyone knows the story of Hewlett Packard and other small startups in the 1930s, but what tends to get left out in a lot of this is the fact that the military had a HUGE interest in the Santa Clara Valley because the climatic conditions favored the building of aircraft. Even Bay Area residents seem to forget that during the interwar era, the Bay Area was probably the most militarized zone on the West Coast (which had unintended consequences: see Japanese internment) because of the large bay, the large densely packed in population, and for better and for worse easy access to Asia (the port of LA/LB wasn't nearly as active, and San Diego didn't get more prominence until AFTER Pearl Harbor). Many companies (such as Lockheed Martin) had their headquarters in places like Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose. Moffit AFB was located in the area as well. It's no coincidence that some of that military R&D money was spent on the development of the internet (started as a Cold War R&D project to make sure communication was still available after a Soviet nuclear attack) and the first internet line was completed between Stanford and UCLA. Berkeley as well got a share of the R&D funds, and gave us such things like the atom bomb (in Lawrence Labs) and would eventually become more tech oriented (albeit later than Stanford). I doubt that if San Francisco was important on any strategic level, that any of these things would have happened.

I wouldn't go as far as to say the whole reason the Bay Area exists is San Francisco, but to suggest that San Francisco had nothing with the way San Jose and Oakland developed is equally preposterous. The REASON the Transcontinental Railroad was even built to where it was is to connect the emerging San Francisco market (by far the LARGEST on the West Coast) to the rest of the country. If San Francisco was located where Monterey or Eureka is today, then the railroad would have ended there and not anywhere near San Francisco Bay. Remember, before Anglo settlement on the West Coast, most of the land around San Francisco Bay (including much of the Santa Clara Valley) was marshland. It was Anglo-American settlement in San Francisco that changed all that.

So even historically San Jose & Silicon Valley has absolutely nothing to do with San Francisco as their reason for developing into prominence. It wasn't until later on when San Jose sprawled into San Francisco that the two became interlinked into one area and by that time Silicon Valley had already existed for several decades.

So really, where does San Jose's sprawl stop and San Francisco's begins? The Santa Clara/San Mateo County line? Santa Clara/Alameda County line? Believe me, if there wasn't a map dictating where the county lines started and stopped, no one would be able to answer this question. The Bay Area, for all intents and purposes, is connected to one another.

And the suburban development of the Santa Clara Valley happened not because of Silicon Valley (that has been an idea that existed only since the 1970s) but because, in part, blue collar workers from San Francisco wanted to have more space to live. By the 1960s, development around the Bay was already apparent, BEFORE the rise of Silicon Valley.

I think you're doing the same thing that you were getting people to not do: Assuming that SF and SJ have no connection at all. That's just as logically flawed as assuming that SJ owes its existence to SF. Like everything else in history, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

The bars in San Jose & Silicon Valley are underrated. The nightlife from my experience is decent but nothing to gloat about. It's a big city and has the amenities of a big city. Museums and whatnot. And it's a great hiking city, very beautiful if you're into that stuff.

Yeah I guess it can be boring if you want an urban environment and whatnot. But it shouldn't be boring in general if you find things to do there.

Oh and just in case if you were curious. San Jose has trains and public transportation. It's got a system already up with that. I know you tend to like public transportation and whatnot so I'm just throwing that out there.

Yeah, San Jose has the VTA light rail lines, CalTrain, and soon, a BART line. However, I like how people assume that the focal point of BART is San Francisco, even though all the lines converge in Oakland

The Bay Area is an extremely complex place to understand. If you stated the traits of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose separately, most people would assume that they are hundreds of miles apart in different parts of the US. However, the truth is that all 3 of them, at least nowadays, need each other. A Bay Area native can probably explain it better than I could, but after living there for 3 years, I can tell you that natives of the Bay Area don't really consider SF/SJ/Oakland in isolation from one another. Bay Area hockey fans go to SJ to see the Sharks (lose) games, Bay Area baseball fans can go watch the Athletics (lose) games in Oakland, or the Giants (choke) in SF. They all watch the same TV channels, they all listen to the same radio stations, and issues from one city affect the whole Bay Area (IE: The NUMMI plant closure in Fremont)

I agree that SF gets way too much credit than it deserves, but it doesn't mean that SF deserves NO credit.

[kidphilly]

Originally Posted by grapico

I would say San Jose by itself is probably #5 in California behind San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego in terms of overall prominence. Even when somebody like Apple or Google holds a media conference, they don't do it in San Jose for instance, they do it in San Francisco.
Also a lot of your newer tech/media/website type companies (that often more people have heard of who are internet junkies) are in San Francisco not Silicon Valley...


Trulia (everybody uses it on this site)
Twitter
Wikipedia
Yelp
StumbleUpon
Wired Magazine
SalesForce



I also wouldn't say Stanford played such a dominant role... UC Berkeley had a lot to do with it also and is tied with Stanford/MIT/Carnegie Mellon as the de facto top CS departments in the world. UC Berkeley also manages Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos.

Steve Wozniak(Apple) for example was a UC Berkeley grad, Steven Chu (Current head of U.S. Dept of Energy), CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, Intel founder Gordon Moore, BSD came from Berkeley...Unix came from Berkeley, Sun came from Bill Joy at Berkeley, SendMail came from Berkeley.

Anyway the point is Silicon Valley didn't just sprout up from nowhere.

but yes SF doesn't have the GIANTS such as HP/Oracle/Apple/Intel/AMD/Google/Yahoo ... a lot of the big companies like that do keep their marketing/advertising/sales/law/finance divisions with an office in SF though. These companies largely built down there b/c it was cheaper and needed massive buildings for their operations.

Ugh I hate Salesforce.com - it continually screws up my outloook

[grapico]

Originally Posted by kidphilly

Ugh I hate Salesforce.com - it continually screws up my outloook

Yeah I am not a huge fan of salesforce from an IT perspective... it is obviously tilted towards SALES... but many companies insist other departments use it... but I have found it really doesn't fit the other departments needs as well, despite add-ons. If you are going to pay out the ying yang ...I'd go with Oracle CRM instead... Or if you have in house devs... go with http://www.sugarforge.org/ and save a boat load... Convincing upper management or sales folks to switch however is futile in my experience.

[durf]

Yeah, I agree that San Jose is not well known, thanks to the 2 most ignorant people in the world-Hollywood' movers & shakers and New York's media with an IQ of only 2. In reality, San Jose should get way more attention than Philly and Atlanta combined due to its size and stature as the high tech capital of the world.

[kidphilly]

Originally Posted by durf

Yeah, I agree that San Jose is not well known, thanks to the 2 most ignorant people in the world-Hollywood' movers & shakers and New York's media with an IQ of only 2. In reality, San Jose should get way more attention than Philly and Atlanta combined due to its size and stature as the high tech capital of the world.

I think if you lobby for a second Target downtown it will get all the credit is deserves.

In all honesty i mostly think of SJ as a companion area to the broader bay Area of which it gets more than it's fair share of attention.

And I also think it is one of more beautiful regions of the country and has exceled in tech in many many many ways

I also think both Atlanta and Philly are great areas and deserve much of the attention these tow areas receive

[jman650]

Originally Posted by DANNYY

My point was that San Jose did NOT develop because of San Francisco and that is historically true. The city was not founded, did not develop and historically did not have a role interlinked with San Francisco.

Silicon Valley, the original start ups with those graduates who came out of Stanford engineering radios, and televisions and such before the Valley got its name decades later were the pioneers to the center of the worlds largest Tech collection that exists there today. And that was brought about NOT because of San Francisco but because of Stanford and the innovation that generated out of Stanford.

That was then and even now many companies were born in Stanford in the Silicon Valley, like Google itself was born on campus in Stanford. It was hosted in its prototype phase on Stanford's website.

Yes San Jose with 1.8 Million people (In its MSA) has come a long way, and with it being the fastest growing division of the Bay Area it will remain to become more populated. And it's role in the Bay Area will increase much more so than presently.

Dannyy, I hear what you are saying and you make several very valid points. But if your argument that SJ grew entirely independent of SF and the draw of Stanford is the basis of that argument, you're overlooking the fact that Stanford exists as a result of Leland Stanford being drawn to the area because of San Francisco. He didn't come out here with grand plans of finding some farm near SJ and creating one of the greatest schools in the US. He came to SF through his many other ventures and subsequently purchased land in Palo Alto. Like I said before, if it weren't for the draw of SF the rest of the Bay Area would not have developed the way it did.

As for your argument that SJ has grown as a result of its own greatness, you're relying heavily on Palo Alto to make that point which doesn't particularly help SJ's case. Palo Alto is the birthplace of Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley's biggest names are almost exclusively beyond San Jose's borders with the exception of a few (Ebay, Adobe, Cisco). Its only really the "Capitol of Silicon Valley" b/c its the biggest city in the area.

You brought up the point of SJ being CA's capitol at one point, but that doesn't mean a whole lot when it was one of 5 capitols CA had in its first 5 years. The fact that the capitol was moved out of San Jose after just one year does more to combat your argument than to assist it. In this regard, SJ is simply in company with Monterey, Vallejo and Benicia.

Don't get me wrong though. I'm actually 100% with Deezus on this one and am really impressed to see how far SJ has come since I was a kid. But like he said, that progress is only very recent and ignoring SF's role in being the major draw to the Bay is a mistake. SJ has not generally been on anyone's map for the majority of its existence, and Oakland, Berkeley and Palo Alto have shined brighter outside of this area and probably still do. SJ definitely has plenty of its own merits, but much of its growth came as a result of SF and the Bay Area at large, and that is simply a fact.

I mean, even the SJ Sharks played in SF before they ever played in SJ, SJ has one of the Giants' minor league teams (SJ Giants) and falls immediately within the Giants' official territory, and the Caltrain has been a direct line of public transit between SF and SJ since 1863. These cities were NEVER entirely independent of each other, and never will be. The Bay Area has grown into what it is as a whole. But the major draw to the Bay Area has always been SF, which is the heart and soul of the Bay, point blank. That doesn't diminish any of what every end of the Bay has to offer in any way, and it doesn't mean that SJ doesn't do its own thing independently w/o having to check in with SF. That's not what I'm saying.

My point is that SF is the major draw to the region and it effectively serves as the Bay Area's "downtown," much like Manhattan does for NYC and its metro. Sure, other parts of NYC have their own downtowns (Brooklyn for example), but Manhattan is still the major draw. Does the rest of NYC and its metro have much to offer? Of course! Have they developed independently of Manhattan? Yes and no, and the same goes for the Bay. Brooklyn was its own city before it was annexed and became part of NYC. The same thing could have been done with Oakland if history had played out that way, but it didn't. Same goes for the entirety San Mateo County, which was originally part of SF before they chose to separate. (Part of Stanford's campus lies in San Mateo County btw.)

So where you're saying that SJ has its own history and its own merits and stands on its own, I am with you. But to say it did this entirely independent of SF as though SF played no role whatsoever in its rise to prominence is false. SF and SJ both benefit from being next to each other, as does the entire Bay Area. This whole area has a lot to offer collectively, and is much stronger as the sum of all its parts than separately in any single piece. Is SF the strongest single piece on its own? Yes, in my mind it absolutely is looking at how much it has to offer overall in every area. But that doesn't mean it accounts for like 75% of the Bay Area's shine while the rest share the other 25% or anything ridiculous like that. The City is the best concentration of everything the Bay has to offer, but it only accounts for one slice of it all.

But I don't really see why you're arguing so vehemently against SF having any role in SJ's development in your efforts to show that SJ grew independently of its own merits when you're arguing in favor of it relying on Stanford and Palo Alto. PA or SF, either way what you're telling us is that it was not completely independent, so I'm not understanding why PA is so much more palatable to you than SF in making your point? The whole truth really lies within the entire region, to be honest. People have migrated to SJ from all over the Bay Area and beyond. Stanford and PA developed Silicon Valley, but SF played its part in that too, which you don't seem to care to acknowledge. I'm a bit confused, but its all good; I guess we'll just agree to disagree.

[jman650]

Originally Posted by grapico

I would say San Jose by itself is probably #5 in California behind San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego in terms of overall prominence. Even when somebody like Apple or Google holds a media conference, they don't do it in San Jose for instance, they do it in San Francisco.
Also a lot of your newer tech/media/website type companies (that often more people have heard of who are internet junkies) are in San Francisco not Silicon Valley...


Trulia (everybody uses it on this site)
Twitter
Wikipedia
Yelp
StumbleUpon
Wired Magazine
SalesForce



I also wouldn't say Stanford played such a dominant role... UC Berkeley had a lot to do with it also and is tied with Stanford/MIT/Carnegie Mellon as the de facto top CS departments in the world. UC Berkeley also manages Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos.

Steve Wozniak(Apple) for example was a UC Berkeley grad, Steven Chu (Current head of U.S. Dept of Energy), CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, Intel founder Gordon Moore, BSD came from Berkeley...Unix came from Berkeley, Sun came from Bill Joy at Berkeley, SendMail came from Berkeley.

Anyway the point is Silicon Valley didn't just sprout up from nowhere.

but yes SF doesn't have the GIANTS such as HP/Oracle/Apple/Intel/AMD/Google/Yahoo ... a lot of the big companies like that do keep their marketing/advertising/sales/law/finance divisions with an office in SF though. These companies largely built down there b/c it was cheaper and needed massive buildings for their operations.

^^ this.

Excellent post Grapico. +1

[jman650]

Originally Posted by Lifeshadower

I think your love for San Jose is admirable man, but I think you're also being extremely too one-sided with the history of the Bay Area.

If my thoughts seem disconnected: my apologies.



I think you're wording this one way too strongly. The reason WHY Stanford put his school where he did was because he still wanted to be relatively close to San Francisco and STILL have access to the peninsular rail line to SF. Remember, Leland Stanford had a huge stakehold on the success of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company


Southern Pacific

Remember, at that time in California history in the pre-Hiram Johnson days, the railroads pretty much owned California. If it was really about putting Stanford away on some non-descript farm, why wouldn't he have built it somewhere in the Central Valley where there is MUCH more land available? Why would it be near a profitable rail-line connecting the Santa Clara farms (growing some of the most profitable crops in the world at the time) to San Francisco? It's not a coincidence. In much of the same way, the reason why USC (my opinion on them shall remain private ) developed in the area it did is because the founded wanted his school to have access to downtown Los Angeles through one of the recently built rail lines.

And let's be real: Stanford wasn't the only game in town. There was this school not too far from SF similarly built in an area that was undeveloped at the time..I think they called it UC Berkeley. You may have heard of it Both schools (Stanford and Berkeley) wouldn't have existed in their current form IF neither were funded by financiers in San Francisco. Both schools have a HUGE part in the way San Francisco and the Bay Area developed, but both owe their prominence BECAUSE of their location relative to San Francisco, not the other way around.

The reason why the Santa Clara Valley developed the way it did had way more to do with government R&D projects (IE: Two World Wars) and cheaper land availability than stuffing the schools into a small compact space in San Francisco. Remember, between the time the Santa Clara Valley switched from being a "farm area" to a "tech area", there was military manufacturing. Everyone knows the story of Hewlett Packard and other small startups in the 1930s, but what tends to get left out in a lot of this is the fact that the military had a HUGE interest in the Santa Clara Valley because the climatic conditions favored the building of aircraft. Even Bay Area residents seem to forget that during the interwar era, the Bay Area was probably the most militarized zone on the West Coast (which had unintended consequences: see Japanese internment) because of the large bay, the large densely packed in population, and for better and for worse easy access to Asia (the port of LA/LB wasn't nearly as active, and San Diego didn't get more prominence until AFTER Pearl Harbor). Many companies (such as Lockheed Martin) had their headquarters in places like Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose. Moffit AFB was located in the area as well. It's no coincidence that some of that military R&D money was spent on the development of the internet (started as a Cold War R&D project to make sure communication was still available after a Soviet nuclear attack) and the first internet line was completed between Stanford and UCLA. Berkeley as well got a share of the R&D funds, and gave us such things like the atom bomb (in Lawrence Labs) and would eventually become more tech oriented (albeit later than Stanford). I doubt that if San Francisco was important on any strategic level, that any of these things would have happened.

I wouldn't go as far as to say the whole reason the Bay Area exists is San Francisco, but to suggest that San Francisco had nothing with the way San Jose and Oakland developed is equally preposterous. The REASON the Transcontinental Railroad was even built to where it was is to connect the emerging San Francisco market (by far the LARGEST on the West Coast) to the rest of the country. If San Francisco was located where Monterey or Eureka is today, then the railroad would have ended there and not anywhere near San Francisco Bay. Remember, before Anglo settlement on the West Coast, most of the land around San Francisco Bay (including much of the Santa Clara Valley) was marshland. It was Anglo-American settlement in San Francisco that changed all that.






So really, where does San Jose's sprawl stop and San Francisco's begins? The Santa Clara/San Mateo County line? Santa Clara/Alameda County line? Believe me, if there wasn't a map dictating where the county lines started and stopped, no one would be able to answer this question. The Bay Area, for all intents and purposes, is connected to one another.

And the suburban development of the Santa Clara Valley happened not because of Silicon Valley (that has been an idea that existed only since the 1970s) but because, in part, blue collar workers from San Francisco wanted to have more space to live. By the 1960s, development around the Bay was already apparent, BEFORE the rise of Silicon Valley.

I think you're doing the same thing that you were getting people to not do: Assuming that SF and SJ have no connection at all. That's just as logically flawed as assuming that SJ owes its existence to SF. Like everything else in history, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.



Yeah, San Jose has the VTA light rail lines, CalTrain, and soon, a BART line. However, I like how people assume that the focal point of BART is San Francisco, even though all the lines converge in Oakland

The Bay Area is an extremely complex place to understand. If you stated the traits of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose separately, most people would assume that they are hundreds of miles apart in different parts of the US. However, the truth is that all 3 of them, at least nowadays, need each other. A Bay Area native can probably explain it better than I could, but after living there for 3 years, I can tell you that natives of the Bay Area don't really consider SF/SJ/Oakland in isolation from one another. Bay Area hockey fans go to SJ to see the Sharks (lose) games, Bay Area baseball fans can go watch the Athletics (lose) games in Oakland, or the Giants (choke) in SF. They all watch the same TV channels, they all listen to the same radio stations, and issues from one city affect the whole Bay Area (IE: The NUMMI plant closure in Fremont)

I agree that SF gets way too much credit than it deserves, but it doesn't mean that SF deserves NO credit.

As usual, excellent, comprehensive post. I know you only lived here a couple of years, but your understanding of the Bay is very accurate, as though you grew up here and simply had pisspoor taste in sports . Wish I could rep ya for this one!