John Heilemann has a great article in New York Magazine on the differences in attitude toward the Web as business between the east coast and the west coast. He writes:
... I asked [Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael] Moritz what sort of piece he would have done, were he still a hack, to capture the industry’s gestalt. Cheekily, Moritz replied that he would have written about the irrelevance of such stories: Who reads newspapers anymore, anyway? (Touché!) Eventually, though, Moritz got around to opining on the bubbliness of the second-generation Web boom. “The great news for me about these times of enthusiasm is that inevitably there’s a lot of bedlam, undoubtedly there’ll be carnage, there’ll be all sorts of carcasses strewn across the road,” he said. “But there will also be a handful of companies that will emerge to become very significant. And that’s what working and living and investing in Silicon Valley has always been about.” ¶ Now, to skeptics, Moritz’s answer will sound like familiar Valley boilerplate—or the purest brand of bullshit. But to me, it says much about why the debate over whether Web 2.0 is a bubble has been so inconclusive and incoherent, conducted as if one side were speaking Swahili and the other barking like a dog. It’s also revealing about the yawning gulf that still divides the two coasts with regard to high-tech moneymaking. And about why, for all its many and manifest virtues, New York remains such a sad-assed backwater when it comes to the Internet industry. ...
Link: New York Magazine. Thanks to Gens Johnson who found it in Good Morning Silicon Valley. --Dennis
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