Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

Two interconnecting news items this week, to file under the rubric “The Buzziness of Business.”

The first item is local, from the business school of the University of Minnesota. In Wednesday’s paper, the head of the Carlson School of Management, David Kidwell, speaks alarmingly about the possible collapse of the Minnesota high-tech scene -- unless the legislature votes to give the school tons of money for high-tech research, and to fund a business incubator to nurture statewide tech startups.

Because if we don’t, Kidwell says, Minnesota will lose its standing in the world of high tech, and we will no longer be considered serious competitors to Silicon Valley, the I-28 corridor, Redmond WA and Austin TX.

This is a scenario that plays on the worst fears of Minnesotans. Whenever something good happens in our neck of the woods, whether in an incubator or a sports stadium, it usually goes bad, or it leaves.

But I hear a low hum. It is as if there were a swarm of bees inside my head. It is as if bees are trying to tell me something.

Some of the bees are saying: “Hey wait a minute. Does anyone seriously consider Minnesota to be in the same league as those other places?”

Those bees have a point. Minnesota has this fond image of itself as a leader in high tech, but its glories have been mainly in the area of big iron and cheap hardware – Control Data, the IBM AS/400, Cray Research, Zeos, Tricord and Northgate. We had a few major software companies, but they left for California.

Minnesota still has a good thing going in the biomedical technology field. But computer technology? Not no more it don’t.

Other bees are saying: “It doesn’t matter if Minnesota is a technology heavyweight or not. Since when do business schools play a meaningful role in economic development?”

Damn, these bees don’t kid around. They’re right, too. Are the other tech centers around the country (Silicon Valley, Redmund, etc.) on the map because business schools in those areas show great leadership? Is Stanford the reason Apple and Hewlett-Packard and Oracle and the rest are great? It’s nice to have all those good brains nearby. But they don’t account for the area’s spectacular successes.

More cruelly, the bees ask: “Is there any place on earth where a business school has had a meaningful effect on local economic development – the encouragement of entrepreneurism, venture success, etc.?” The bees want to know if any great company ever began life in a biz school incubator.

Or is it possible that Dr. Kidwell is engaging in a little prairie empire-building? On that topic the bees are discreet.

But let’s turn to the other news story, taking place where no one is worried about a decline in the high tech – Cupertino, California. This story involves a humble little house – one bedroom, 792 square feet of space, hardwood floors, a fireplace, brick patio and tiny yard. The asking price was high enough, at $409,000. But so desperate are Silicon Valley workers for homes that the house was bid up to $550,500.

There’s a picture of the house in the San Jose Mercury. It’s the sort of place you duck your head to enter. We in the provincial Midwest would say it’s not much house for a half million plus. Another 1BR home nearby sold for $869,000. That’s how things are there.

Do you hear the buzzing again? It’s getting awful loud. Stand the stories alongside one another and the buzz becomes deafening.

What are they both about? Technology and place. Technology was supposed to virtualize everything, make place irrelevant. You can do high tech work in a yurt (a hut of yak hides made) in the Mongolian Gobi as well as anywhere. You could technically do it in Minnesota.

But it ain’t playing out that way. Eighty percent of the entire dotcom revolution is happening in a hundred square geophysical miles south of the San Francisco Bay. Being close together, drawing on the deep intellectual resources of the locale, is critical to that success story. Like shoe-makers in Italy, or chocolatiers in Switzerland.

And poor, idiotic Minnesota, imagining it is “competing” with the likes of that. Like the techno-gods in the land of gold will elect to splinter apart, and some hardy Donner Party in reverse will trek back to snowy, mosquitoey Minnesota to do something insanely great on our barren, lonely tundra.

Who’d of thunk it, the bees want to know -- that the great lesson of the information age (so far) is what businesses have known from time immemorial. The three great predictors of business success remain, ahem:

Location, location, and location.

 

 

 

 

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