The web wasn't, and yet Silicon Valley was the region that got rich off of it, and ended up with its name associated with it.
The web started at CERN in Switzerland. Mosaic came out of UIUC, as did Apache. Early web successes came from all over - Amazon from Seattle, Geocities from LA, ViaWeb and Akamai from Boston, WikiWikiWeb from Portland, Yahoo and EBay from Silicon Valley. Many of the most prominent Web 2.0 companies - FaceBook, Reddit, DropBox, and YCombinator - all started in Boston and later moved to San Francisco. Flickr was in Vancouver, LiveJournal in Seattle, and del.icio.us in NYC. A number of Silicon Valley companies didn't actually start in Silicon Valley - they started elsewhere and moved there early on.
Silicon Valley ended up co-opting them because of two factors: capital and engineering talent. Unlike in most places, it's possible to make a market in venture capital in Silicon Valley - you can setup meetings with a hundred firms all down the peninsula and have them bid against each other. That means that if you do have a good idea, you can get hundreds of millions of dollars to grow it, and then spend that money hiring people who actually know what they're doing and have done it before. If all that fails, you can either acquire companies that have an actual good idea, or be acquired by a company with capital and an ability to execute.
Silicon Valley has never really been a great place to start a company, unless you just happen to live here and have a job at one of the previous tech giants. It was, and remains, a great place to scale a company. None of the factors that led to its dominance in the last few technology waves have really changed, except possibly more restrictive U.S. immigration policy and a greater chance that the next big idea comes from outside the U.S.
Thing is, the money in SV, will pick up on whatever that is and jump in quick.
There is whatever comes next, could be gestating anywhere. And there is SV participating. Given the potential, unless whatever comes next is very seriously misaligned with SV potential, acting on it will basically be a boom for SV.
As a competetor, SV works within a huge economy with vast talent and resources available.
The next thing does not have to originate in SV for it's impact to be felt in SV.
it's probably still going to be someplace where there's a large concentration of money. it's also probably going to be in a mild climate, because those people with loads of money to invest don't want to live in the arctic. so, perhaps not SV directly, but i bet it will look similar.
The web started at CERN in Switzerland. Mosaic came out of UIUC, as did Apache. Early web successes came from all over - Amazon from Seattle, Geocities from LA, ViaWeb and Akamai from Boston, WikiWikiWeb from Portland, Yahoo and EBay from Silicon Valley. Many of the most prominent Web 2.0 companies - FaceBook, Reddit, DropBox, and YCombinator - all started in Boston and later moved to San Francisco. Flickr was in Vancouver, LiveJournal in Seattle, and del.icio.us in NYC. A number of Silicon Valley companies didn't actually start in Silicon Valley - they started elsewhere and moved there early on.
Silicon Valley ended up co-opting them because of two factors: capital and engineering talent. Unlike in most places, it's possible to make a market in venture capital in Silicon Valley - you can setup meetings with a hundred firms all down the peninsula and have them bid against each other. That means that if you do have a good idea, you can get hundreds of millions of dollars to grow it, and then spend that money hiring people who actually know what they're doing and have done it before. If all that fails, you can either acquire companies that have an actual good idea, or be acquired by a company with capital and an ability to execute.
Silicon Valley has never really been a great place to start a company, unless you just happen to live here and have a job at one of the previous tech giants. It was, and remains, a great place to scale a company. None of the factors that led to its dominance in the last few technology waves have really changed, except possibly more restrictive U.S. immigration policy and a greater chance that the next big idea comes from outside the U.S.