STILL THE CENTER OF THIS WORLD

摘要

When Ben T. Smith started organizing a tech startup called Spoke Soft-ware last year, he couldn't imagine locating it anywhere but Silicon Valley. The Valley had the engineers, the tech marketers, the lawyers, and, most important, the venture capitalists. "There is nowhere else like this," he says. "Everything I need is right here." Everything but an affordable place to do business. By the end of 2003, Smith plans to move 30% of his software engineering, or the next 10 hires he makes for his 50-employee company, out of Spoke's headquarters, a walkup space on a side street near Stanford University in Palo Alto. Why? Despite an unemployment rate hovering at 8.5% and an office-vacancy rate that has quadrupled over the past three years, to more than 20%, the Valley is still one of the costliest places in the world to run a business. Sure, office space can be had at a quarter of what it fetched during the bubble. But a typical engineer still costs about $150,000 per year when health care and office gear are added in. "The economic model in the Valley no longer allows you to have all of your employees here," says Smith. So Valley execs are considering shipping jobs to places like Bangalore, Beijing, and Prague, where talent can be had for one-third the price. Even Boston is 20% cheaper.