HP and Oracle don’t exactly represent the heart of Silicon Valley today and what makes it special/unique. I actually think zombie corporations like Oracle, companies that haven’t innovated in decades and instead rely on an army of sales people to sell legacy software, are somewhat the antithesis of Silicon Valley which is really about real technological innovation and disruption at it’s core. I know there are lots of exceptions to this somewhat idyllic version of Silicon Valley but at the same time, you can’t really argue that there is a place in the US (or the rest of the world for that matter) that produces more technological advancements than Silicon Valley. I’m not a believer in American Exceptionalism — just stating facts. This is a long winded way of saying who cares if those companies leave, the Bay Area is probably better off.
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HP moving to Texas is the corporate version of my grandparents retiring to Florida.
Sure HP and Oracle are not "sexy" but they do employee massive numbers of tech folks. The impact will be noticed. They hire people who later move to the "sexy" companies a few years into their career.
But moving to Texas frees up real estate in the Bay Area for more productive businesses. And given the transient nature of techies, many of those techies would have moved to California will now move to Texas, putting some relief into the housing market and maybe clearing up traffic a bit. I wouldn’t see these two moving as a negative, they’ve long had reputations as bad places to work.
What about Tesla and Palantir?
Except HP is not retiring and no-ones grandparent.
I partially agree. However, Elon Musk has personally moved to Texas, and he's begun moving some operations of his companies there as well, like SpaceX and Tesla. And those are certainly disruptors.
You're underestimating just how toxic California's political climate has become towards business. Democrats see them as bottomless pits of money to be abused and extorted, while giving them nothing back in return. Some companies are still willing to put up with it, but many, both companies and individuals, are getting out. Already, California has a net immigration deficit. The only reason California's population isn't shrinking is due to its local birth rate.
The political climate in California is astonishingly toxic and disconnected from the realities of the market. I for one cannot wait to leave this place for greener pastures. California's answer to everything is raise taxes. And everyone cheers. And nothing gets fixed.
It's the latter that really bugs me.
I'm willing and even happy to pay taxes for commensurate benefits. I don't really feel like I get that in CA. It's like an extremely inefficient engine.
Ironically there is one way in which the tax benefits are ABSURDLY generous - unemployment. When I saw how much that returned I was staggered. Perhaps I'm in an income sweet spot, but when I calculated it, it was far more assistance than I would have expected from a non-French government.
I'm aware of course that state tax sits on top of Federal tax, but when you factor into the equation what responsibilities are Federal and not state, it looks astonishingly poorly distributed.
I'm not really sure how the high cost of living is anything other than a milestone around the area's neck. I've lived in v-high COL areas, but that has always gone hand in hand with extreme density, which could easily be viewed at as a simple tax for the provision of world-class services. Somehow I'm out here in suburbia paying Megacity rates.
> California's answer to everything is raise taxes.
Really? It's almost the end of 2020 and California hasn't passed a single tax increase. Let's look at 2020 ballot measures:
* Requires commercial and industrial properties to be taxed based on market value and dedicates revenue? REJECTED
Source: https://ballotpedia.org/California_2020_ballot_propositions
And legislation?
* AB 2088 - Wealth Tax? REJECTED
* AB 1253 - Tax rate increase on taxpayers making over $1M? REJECTED
* AB 398 - Headcount tax on businesses with 500+ employees? REJECTED
Source: https://blog.armaninollp.com/tax/2020/09/08/ca-legislative-s...
FWIW, Democrats have held a supermajority (>= 2/3) in both the House and Senate all year long.
The trick is, will those voting for taxes to be raised do the same when they relocate elsewhere? California is not a dictatorship. The people of the state have voted for this situation.
I realize that not everyone in California votes and thinks the same. Those leaving the state might not be reflective of the voting patterns of the state as a whole but doubt this migration out of California is impactless on the places those leaving go to.
SpaceX moving specifically to Brownsville, which is the point closest to the equator in the USA other than Florida. The spaceport will be closer to the equator than Kennedy Space Center.
Oracle leaving for Texas reminded me of this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
People getting excited for Texas seems a bit silly! Real tech hub but... this is Oracle. C'mon.
The damage to CA's economy won't come from the has-beens leaving, but the never-will-be's that never happen.
It's hard to have a ramen startup when your garage costs a million dollars.
SF has been operating on the "Get Big Quick" financial injection model for a while now, so it probably won't stop those types of companies. But we shouldn't pretend that there's been a good environment for the idyllic startup in at least 20 years in the Bay Area.
> I actually think zombie corporations like Oracle, companies that haven’t innovated in decades and instead rely on an army of sales people to sell legacy software.
Those army of sales people are probably now selling you the latest and greatest in vendor lock-in on behalf of AWS [0] and GCP [1]. There is no escaping the sales army :)
[0] https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/aws-takes-aim-at-oracle-by-hi...
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/04/09/google-c...
Are you suggesting Oracle wasn't a vendor lock in ploy from the start? I feel like they've just gone from one vendor lock-in to another.
Agreed. They're companies trying to avoid taxes or regulation. Only companies on the downslide really consider that as an relevant option.
To be fair, here's the complete list of companies in the known universe that don't try to avoid taxes or regulation:
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There's a cost of moving. California's taxes and regulations are bad, bad enough to force many out, but not all. If things continue on their present course, even Google and Amazon, who personally like the political climate there, will have to start looking elsewhere.
Some folks in my network are ex-Oracle and my understanding is that the company is run by the CFO and a huge group of MBAs. Any company where the bean counters are at the helm are optimizing for things like quarterly earnings, tax savings like you said, etc. This is the stage where they milk whatever they can out of a dying cash cow. There’s nothing interesting to me about this flavor of capitalism and I don’t think it’s something America should be proud of producing. Conversely, technology innovation and the entire ecosystem in Silicon Valley is really special and almost irreplicable.
Note: I have nothing against MBAs, I just don’t think it’s appropriate for them to have the loudest voice at a non-financial institution. They serve a critical role but it’s a supporting one and not suitable to leadership / company direction.
> They're companies trying to avoid taxes or regulation. Only companies on the downslide really consider that as an relevant option.
Which is why continental Europe has so many fast-growing tech companies.
Like TSLA?
Like Tesla.
A large company like that fertilizes the employment landscape - they hire in large numbers, conduct university recruiting, file H1B paperwork, bring Canadian students and accommodate their co-op schedules, pay relocation, etc. Rarely an expense that a small or medium startup is willing to undertake.
I remember seeing a recruiting report for Yahoo! when I worked there a decade and a half ago. Recruiting kept track of employees' previous work history as well as longevity of such employees within Yahoo! Turns out the top feeder company for them (easy to recruit people, and those recruits tend to linger on) was Oracle.
My understanding is that California has pretty good laws for allowing employees to move on to other companies (specifically, I think non-competes are illegal there).
It'll be really interesting to see if the fertilization still works as well in a state like Texas that's ok with things like non-competes, etc, being used to limit employee mobility.
"HP and Oracle don’t exactly represent the heart of Silicon Valley today and what makes it special/unique. I actually think zombie corporations like Oracle,"
This sentiment is problematic. Oracle has 130 000 employees and $40B in revenue. That's massive.
They are a tech company, not a media company like FB.
They are a lynchpin, just because 'we don't like them' doesn't make them 'not' that.
It's like Burning Man: everyone has their view on 'what it is' but really they mean to say 'what it ought to be'. What it is ... is more objective.
Oracle and companies like them are a huge part of what the SV is, full stop.
It's 'mostly' bad for SV to be losing Oracle.
The 'Bay Exit' story is probably overblown, but it's also very real, and less to do with 'leavers' than the fact it's just easier to do things elsewhere in the first place, at least for some kind of companies.
I agree with everyone's sentiment that Oracle and HP are dinosaurs lead by people in the finance department, but I also agree with yours. These companies are also canaries. We've crossed the tax and bureaucracy threshold that companies are willing to deal with.
I predict that it will continue to be a slow transition until a tax friendly state with a decent tech hub joins California, Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma in banning non-competes. If that ever happens, California is in deeper trouble.
https://www.graalvm.org/ seems like a great innovation to me, not sure if there are other examples.
Yeah literally nothing about Oracle is useful or innovative. It’s like the WalMart of tech companies; just kind of exists and has rested on its laurels for a decade+.
Kind of a strange analogy. Walmart provides immense value to millions of people. They've developed an infrastructure that delivers cheap products to areas that otherwise would have few other options.
Oracle is the antithesis of Walmart. They provide insanely expensive options to corporations who are already locked in to their products.
One of the saddest days was when Oracle bought Sun and effectively killed all their open source projects overnight, like OpenOffice and MySQL. Yes, those things are still technically around, but they're not getting any serious development, and all the core developers of those projects have forked them into new open source projects.
Idk if that's fair to Walmart, they are definitely trying to compete with Amazon via new efforts.
Don't give Oracle too much credit, Walmart is far more innovative then Oracle.
I don't think Oracle is a innovation focused company but its a bit naive to think they are just resting on laurels. They bring in nearly 40 billion a year in revenue and this year tried to buy tiktok. It's not like people are twiddling their thumbs over there just because the software they make is typically used by enterprise companies in unsexy ways.
Oracle has been a good steward of MySQL. I thought it was over when they acquired Sun, but the performance and features have really improved since then.
They did develop GraalVM, which is quite a technical achievement, or so I've heard (not a user).
Oracle is creating innovative new legal theories in Oracle v Google. Not that I'd consider that a positive thing.
Jdk?
Oracle is one of the most hated companies on HN, and for years, I assumed that it's a backwards corporate behemoth. Of course, as I work with startups and not huge enterprises, I have actual experience only with Postgresq, MySQL and MongoDB, and not Oracle, but that video about anthropomorphisizing Larry Ellison is so funny.
However, I started going through CMU intro to databases course (btw, it's amazing) and one advanced database feature or optimization after another, I hear "only MSSQL or Oracle do that". Which strated me thinking: is Oracle really that stupid and backwards? Or is it just folklore?
It's not that their tech is bad, it's that the company is evil. Stuff like this, for instance: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/950n15/amazon_...
It may have more to do with cost structure. FAANGs have a willingness to pay much higher salaries, even if they could've hired for less than half the cost elsewhere so it makes more sense for them to be in the bay area, especially since those are super high margin businesses. YOu'll notice that Amazon, a business where margins are important is notably absent from the bay area.
HP ate Compaq, whose HQ was in TX right? That move is unsurprising to say the least.
Yeah they kept the Compaq HQ as a giant HP office in Houston, but it flooded like 2 years ago so HPE was building a replacement office anyways.
What?? HP is THE center of Silicon Valley. Ok it used to be, but so many things came from HP and the whole culture.
> produces more technological advancements than Silicon Valley
Boston would say otherwise.
You prefer skinny jeans and beards, I gotcha!
A tech company, leaving the Bay Area? Don’t make me laugh!
Tesla’s leaving? Good riddance to Musk.
HP and Oracle are leaving? Good riddance to zombie tech companies! <- You are here
Uber is leaving? Well they’re slave drivers anyway, good riddance.
...
The sarcasm seems lost on people.
Don't forget Charles Schwab leaving to Texas from CA as well. Lefty's will try to justify this all day long. California is bad for business. Period.
Parable of the Fox and the Grapes.
I noticed this as well: the 'exodus' is comprised (so far) of companies which haven't innovated in a long time.
At least according to the linked article, three companies so far have moved to Texas. The word 'exodus' seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The bigger 'exodus' might be the glut of folks who temporarily moved away from the Bay Area at the start of the pandemic and have made those moves permanent. I don't have hard data to back up whether that would qualify as an exodus (and not sure what number is required for that classification either - just that it's greater than three), other than anecdotal evidence and personally knowing a few folks who moved back to their hometowns permanently from that area.