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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, comp

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.

Hypx 6y ago
Agreed. They're companies trying to avoid taxes or regulation. Only companies on the downslide really consider that as an relevant option.
- dkobran 6y ago
  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.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    Growth at geriatric tech companies like IBM, HP, Oracle, etc. is largely inorganic, driven by well-negotiated acquisitions of smaller B2B software companies. It takes MBAs to do this sort of work, and while it isn't for me, I don't think it's the worst business model out there.
    - barnesto 6y ago
      it doesn't take an MBA to do that work
    - skinnymuch 6y ago
      Why does it take an MBA to do that work?
      - ativzzz 6y ago
        You don't need an MBA for the financial/high level business knowledge requirements (though many people involved in this have one), but the people networks that MBA programs provide are very beneficial in getting connected to the right person at the right company.
        skinnymuch 6y ago
        So MBA actually means MBA from top 10, maybe top 15 school? I can’t imagine the network being too useful for the 25th best MBA program. My friends have only recently graduated from their MBAs. Will be interesting to see if their networks help.
        ativzzz 6y ago
        The main value of an MBA is the network. I think lower tier schools can work well if they are tight knit and the graduates tend to stay local to the school. The top tier schools will just have people making more money at more "prestigious" companies.
  - abfan1127 6y ago
    I've seen a lot of tech companies with CFOs as leaders and you're 100% right. They have a certain set of tools and fix those types of problems, which usually aren't the ways to lead tech companies. I think every company should be lead by a person who has a strong background in the company's main role. I have seen finance background CEOs get replaced and the Company began to thrive again. Its not a bad investing idea!
- 0x445442 6y ago
  Like TSLA?
  - _fat_santa 6y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe only Musk is moving to Texas, not Telsa. Thought at this point they are basically one in the same.
    - beamatronic 6y ago
      Tesla is building factories in Texas. Long term Texas makes more sense for manufacturing as there are established supply chains there.
      - mrlala 6y ago
        You also probably have tons of cheap flat land that is ideal for manufacturing? So that would seem to make sense.
        mainstreemm 6y ago
        The Midwest has that too. But it also has unions. :)
        blaser-waffle 6y ago
        It's also a lot further away from the Mexico border, where an awful lot of car parts are manufactured. A whole lot of those parts are already flowing through TX as it is, easier to dip into the existing streams than build new supply chains. Also a lot of bigger, tech friendly cities -- Dallas, Austin, and Houston is poised to overtake Chicago as the 3rd largest city in the US within a decade or two. Kanasas may be similar in terms of taxes and political climate (unions) but all its really got going for it is empty space. Ditto for much of the rest of the Midwest.
    - SmokeyHamster 6y ago
- SmokeyHamster 6y ago
  To be fair, here's the complete list of companies in the known universe that don't try to avoid taxes or regulation: [error data not found] 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.
  - joubert 6y ago
    > Amazon Headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Not California.
    - njarboe 6y ago
      Which also does not have state income tax.
      - mtnGoat 6y ago
        nah, we got some of the highest sales tax in the country instead.
        njarboe 6y ago
        Sure, but California has similar levels of sales tax to Washington and the highest state income taxes in addition.
        mtnGoat 6y ago
        Yea, the stats always say Washington has some of the highest sales tax, but i am shocked at how much i pay when in SF/LA/NYC. My tax burden has certainly lowered since moving from CA to WA, kinda miss the weather though.
    - patagonia 6y ago
      Funny to point this out. Bezos literally packed up his car and drove from NYC to Seattle in order to avoid Internet commerce taxes.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  > 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.
  - maedla 6y ago
    I think that the work culture in Europe is also a factor. Europeans are much less willing to work the way a lot of the startups expect.
    - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
      This isn't true at all. There are people everywhere willing to work their butts off and people everywhere who are wanting to do 9-5 work/life balance. Those in Europe who want to work the way startups expect tend to try it in the USA. Not always, but many of them do.
    - wcarron 6y ago
      Good for them. American work culture is...well, retarded (I couldn't think of a less offensive term that also describes it well).
      - AzzieElbab 6y ago
        Have you visited Asia?
        wcarron 6y ago
        Not as an adult, no.
- chrshawkes 6y ago
  Like Tesla.
cheriot 6y ago
HP moving to Texas is the corporate version of my grandparents retiring to Florida.
- WillYouFinish 6y ago
  Except HP is not retiring and no-ones grandparent.
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  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.
  - bluedino 6y ago
    >> Sure HP and Oracle are not "sexy" but they do employee massive numbers of tech folks. It's a much different type of employee than you'd have at somewhere like Netflix or Google, though.
  - seanmcdirmid 6y ago
    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.
    - sithlord 6y ago
      The biggest hit will be on tax revenue, new "sexy" businesses dont tend to make as much money as the zombie companies that seem to print money
      - gumby 6y ago
        California makes money on cap gains taxes as well as corporate income taxes. And likely the personal income taxes won't change. Complaining about dev teams moving to texas is like complaining about goods being manufactured in China. It's a net positive for the whole world, plus competition will improve the Vally and SF just as much as it improves individual companies and products.
dannyincolor 6y ago
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+.
- djohnston 6y ago
  Idk if that's fair to Walmart, they are definitely trying to compete with Amazon via new efforts.
  - dannyincolor 6y ago
    You are correct; Walmart actually does have some nice innovation labs around the country doing some great work. Forgot about that and Walmart is an easy target for a lot of things :)
  - dkobran 6y ago
    I don’t disagree that Walmart is making strides on the online shopping front but I also think they are only fighting for survival/relevance and would not produce anything new or interesting without this pressure. In contrast, companies like Amazon relentlessly develop new products and new technologies (see AWS). It’s not a response to external pressure — they don’t need to innovate to stay alive. They really embody the disruptive ambition / anything is possible mentality that fuels Silicon Valley. I sound like an Amazon fan boy but I’m the opposite haha just pointing out a difference in the DNA of these two companies.
    - dannyincolor 6y ago
      I didn’t know about Walmart’s innovation labs til recently. Might not be as innovative as I think, but it certainly changed the way I view them.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
      Walmart had the largest corporate database in the world at one point in time (about a decade and a half ago), and used it to build a brutally efficient supply chain. Innovation in process engineering and operations isn't really discussed much here, but it's almost assuredly had a much greater impact on keeping inflation at bay (helping the median American's salary stretch a little farther) than anything Amazon has ever done.
emmanueloga_ 6y ago
https://www.graalvm.org/ https://www.graalvm.org/ seems like a great innovation to me, not sure if there are other examples.
xienze 6y ago
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. ...
- refurb 6y ago
  Parable of the Fox and the Grapes.
- gk1 6y ago
  The sarcasm seems lost on people.
- chrshawkes 6y ago
  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.
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    If "California is bad for business. Period", then how come it has the 7th largest economy in the world? Seems like business has been thriving there for decades. (Reducing a complex ecosystem to a pithy statement usually reveals more of your own personal projection, rather than positively contribute to conversations.)
SmokeyHamster 6y ago
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.
- billylindeman 6y ago
  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.
  - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
    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.
    - thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
      Yes, that is a big problem. People don't seem to learn their lesson. CA peoples leave CA and go to austin and we're already seeing some of the same things happening there as in CA, where housing supply is restricted and of course, at that point housing prices go up again. People just never learn the fundamentals of economics and how those decisions lead to economic hardship for so many, that's the real problem.
ryneandal 6y ago
HP ate Compaq, whose HQ was in TX right? That move is unsurprising to say the least.
- sct202 6y ago
  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.
vmchale 6y ago
Oracle leaving for Texas reminded me of this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 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.
- abernard1 6y ago
  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.
  - game_the0ry 6y ago
    > It's hard to have a ramen startup when your garage costs a million dollars. Word. Peter Thiel had something to say about this - basically, he said that so much of the VC money that a start up would raise would go to rent that it no longer makes sense to start a company in the Bay Area. And those garages in Austin, Nashville, Charlotte, Railegh-Durham, and basically every where else are starting to look very attractive to savvy start up founders. Especially under the WFH circumstances bc of covid.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      Austin's been on the tech radar for a while, but I've seen a lot of my friends from the DC area head down to Raleigh-Durham, easily 5+, and a couple who headed to Nashville.
    - bsagdiyev 6y ago
      Raleigh is where we’re headed in January, California has been great for the past 20 years or so but now with full WFH we don’t need to stay.
    - iancmceachern 6y ago
jariel 6y ago
"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.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  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.
  - random5634 6y ago
    The AB5 mess is just emblematic. I'm a "big goverment" supporter, but not so into the totally incompetent govt. The number of loopholes that had to be carved out of this law was ridiculous. What happened to good infrastructure, education, safety, health care, raise the federal minimum wage etc?
gfo 6y ago
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.
prostoalex 6y ago
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.
- MikeTheGreat 6y ago
  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.
ignoramous 6y ago
> 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-hiring-new-americas-sales-leader https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/aws-takes-aim-at-oracle-by-hi... [1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/04/09/google-cloud-hiring-sales-kurian-oracle-amzn-msft.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/04/09/google-c...
- verelo 6y ago
  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.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    I was suggesting that AWS is probably the new Oracle.
chrshawkes 6y ago
You prefer skinny jeans and beards, I gotcha!
thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
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.
golergka 6y ago
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?
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  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_to_ditch_oracle_by_2020/e3p9zvc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/950n15/amazon_...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jbverschoor 6y ago
What?? HP is THE center of Silicon Valley. Ok it used to be, but so many things came from HP and the whole culture.
drannex 6y ago
> produces more technological advancements than Silicon Valley Boston would say otherwise.

Hypx 6y ago

Agreed. They're companies trying to avoid taxes or regulation. Only companies on the downslide really consider that as an relevant option.

dkobran 6y ago
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.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  Growth at geriatric tech companies like IBM, HP, Oracle, etc. is largely inorganic, driven by well-negotiated acquisitions of smaller B2B software companies. It takes MBAs to do this sort of work, and while it isn't for me, I don't think it's the worst business model out there.
  - barnesto 6y ago
    it doesn't take an MBA to do that work
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    Why does it take an MBA to do that work?
    - ativzzz 6y ago
      You don't need an MBA for the financial/high level business knowledge requirements (though many people involved in this have one), but the people networks that MBA programs provide are very beneficial in getting connected to the right person at the right company.
      - skinnymuch 6y ago
        So MBA actually means MBA from top 10, maybe top 15 school? I can’t imagine the network being too useful for the 25th best MBA program. My friends have only recently graduated from their MBAs. Will be interesting to see if their networks help.
        ativzzz 6y ago
        The main value of an MBA is the network. I think lower tier schools can work well if they are tight knit and the graduates tend to stay local to the school. The top tier schools will just have people making more money at more "prestigious" companies.
- abfan1127 6y ago
  I've seen a lot of tech companies with CFOs as leaders and you're 100% right. They have a certain set of tools and fix those types of problems, which usually aren't the ways to lead tech companies. I think every company should be lead by a person who has a strong background in the company's main role. I have seen finance background CEOs get replaced and the Company began to thrive again. Its not a bad investing idea!
0x445442 6y ago
Like TSLA?
- _fat_santa 6y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe only Musk is moving to Texas, not Telsa. Thought at this point they are basically one in the same.
  - beamatronic 6y ago
    Tesla is building factories in Texas. Long term Texas makes more sense for manufacturing as there are established supply chains there.
    - mrlala 6y ago
      You also probably have tons of cheap flat land that is ideal for manufacturing? So that would seem to make sense.
      - mainstreemm 6y ago
        The Midwest has that too. But it also has unions. :)
        blaser-waffle 6y ago
        It's also a lot further away from the Mexico border, where an awful lot of car parts are manufactured. A whole lot of those parts are already flowing through TX as it is, easier to dip into the existing streams than build new supply chains. Also a lot of bigger, tech friendly cities -- Dallas, Austin, and Houston is poised to overtake Chicago as the 3rd largest city in the US within a decade or two. Kanasas may be similar in terms of taxes and political climate (unions) but all its really got going for it is empty space. Ditto for much of the rest of the Midwest.
  - SmokeyHamster 6y ago
SmokeyHamster 6y ago
To be fair, here's the complete list of companies in the known universe that don't try to avoid taxes or regulation: [error data not found] 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.
- joubert 6y ago
  > Amazon Headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Not California.
  - njarboe 6y ago
    Which also does not have state income tax.
    - mtnGoat 6y ago
      nah, we got some of the highest sales tax in the country instead.
      - njarboe 6y ago
        Sure, but California has similar levels of sales tax to Washington and the highest state income taxes in addition.
        mtnGoat 6y ago
        Yea, the stats always say Washington has some of the highest sales tax, but i am shocked at how much i pay when in SF/LA/NYC. My tax burden has certainly lowered since moving from CA to WA, kinda miss the weather though.
  - patagonia 6y ago
    Funny to point this out. Bezos literally packed up his car and drove from NYC to Seattle in order to avoid Internet commerce taxes.
dcolkitt 6y ago
> 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.
- maedla 6y ago
  I think that the work culture in Europe is also a factor. Europeans are much less willing to work the way a lot of the startups expect.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    This isn't true at all. There are people everywhere willing to work their butts off and people everywhere who are wanting to do 9-5 work/life balance. Those in Europe who want to work the way startups expect tend to try it in the USA. Not always, but many of them do.
  - wcarron 6y ago
    Good for them. American work culture is...well, retarded (I couldn't think of a less offensive term that also describes it well).
    - AzzieElbab 6y ago
      Have you visited Asia?
      - wcarron 6y ago
        Not as an adult, no.
chrshawkes 6y ago
Like Tesla.

cheriot 6y ago

HP moving to Texas is the corporate version of my grandparents retiring to Florida.

WillYouFinish 6y ago
Except HP is not retiring and no-ones grandparent.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
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.
- bluedino 6y ago
  >> Sure HP and Oracle are not "sexy" but they do employee massive numbers of tech folks. It's a much different type of employee than you'd have at somewhere like Netflix or Google, though.
- seanmcdirmid 6y ago
  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.
  - sithlord 6y ago
    The biggest hit will be on tax revenue, new "sexy" businesses dont tend to make as much money as the zombie companies that seem to print money
    - gumby 6y ago
      California makes money on cap gains taxes as well as corporate income taxes. And likely the personal income taxes won't change. Complaining about dev teams moving to texas is like complaining about goods being manufactured in China. It's a net positive for the whole world, plus competition will improve the Vally and SF just as much as it improves individual companies and products.

dannyincolor 6y ago

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+.

djohnston 6y ago
Idk if that's fair to Walmart, they are definitely trying to compete with Amazon via new efforts.
- dannyincolor 6y ago
  You are correct; Walmart actually does have some nice innovation labs around the country doing some great work. Forgot about that and Walmart is an easy target for a lot of things :)
- dkobran 6y ago
  I don’t disagree that Walmart is making strides on the online shopping front but I also think they are only fighting for survival/relevance and would not produce anything new or interesting without this pressure. In contrast, companies like Amazon relentlessly develop new products and new technologies (see AWS). It’s not a response to external pressure — they don’t need to innovate to stay alive. They really embody the disruptive ambition / anything is possible mentality that fuels Silicon Valley. I sound like an Amazon fan boy but I’m the opposite haha just pointing out a difference in the DNA of these two companies.
  - dannyincolor 6y ago
    I didn’t know about Walmart’s innovation labs til recently. Might not be as innovative as I think, but it certainly changed the way I view them.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    Walmart had the largest corporate database in the world at one point in time (about a decade and a half ago), and used it to build a brutally efficient supply chain. Innovation in process engineering and operations isn't really discussed much here, but it's almost assuredly had a much greater impact on keeping inflation at bay (helping the median American's salary stretch a little farther) than anything Amazon has ever done.

emmanueloga_ 6y ago

https://www.graalvm.org/ https://www.graalvm.org/ seems like a great innovation to me, not sure if there are other examples.

xienze 6y ago

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. ...

refurb 6y ago
Parable of the Fox and the Grapes.
gk1 6y ago
The sarcasm seems lost on people.
chrshawkes 6y ago
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.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  If "California is bad for business. Period", then how come it has the 7th largest economy in the world? Seems like business has been thriving there for decades. (Reducing a complex ecosystem to a pithy statement usually reveals more of your own personal projection, rather than positively contribute to conversations.)

SmokeyHamster 6y ago

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.

billylindeman 6y ago
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.
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  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.
  - thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
    Yes, that is a big problem. People don't seem to learn their lesson. CA peoples leave CA and go to austin and we're already seeing some of the same things happening there as in CA, where housing supply is restricted and of course, at that point housing prices go up again. People just never learn the fundamentals of economics and how those decisions lead to economic hardship for so many, that's the real problem.

ryneandal 6y ago

HP ate Compaq, whose HQ was in TX right? That move is unsurprising to say the least.

sct202 6y ago
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.

vmchale 6y ago

Oracle leaving for Texas reminded me of this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 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.

abernard1 6y ago
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.
- game_the0ry 6y ago
  > It's hard to have a ramen startup when your garage costs a million dollars. Word. Peter Thiel had something to say about this - basically, he said that so much of the VC money that a start up would raise would go to rent that it no longer makes sense to start a company in the Bay Area. And those garages in Austin, Nashville, Charlotte, Railegh-Durham, and basically every where else are starting to look very attractive to savvy start up founders. Especially under the WFH circumstances bc of covid.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Austin's been on the tech radar for a while, but I've seen a lot of my friends from the DC area head down to Raleigh-Durham, easily 5+, and a couple who headed to Nashville.
  - bsagdiyev 6y ago
    Raleigh is where we’re headed in January, California has been great for the past 20 years or so but now with full WFH we don’t need to stay.
  - iancmceachern 6y ago

jariel 6y ago

"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.

chaostheory 6y ago
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.
- random5634 6y ago
  The AB5 mess is just emblematic. I'm a "big goverment" supporter, but not so into the totally incompetent govt. The number of loopholes that had to be carved out of this law was ridiculous. What happened to good infrastructure, education, safety, health care, raise the federal minimum wage etc?

gfo 6y ago

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.

prostoalex 6y ago

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.

MikeTheGreat 6y ago
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.

ignoramous 6y ago

> 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-hiring-new-americas-sales-leader https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/aws-takes-aim-at-oracle-by-hi... [1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/04/09/google-cloud-hiring-sales-kurian-oracle-amzn-msft.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/04/09/google-c...

verelo 6y ago
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.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  I was suggesting that AWS is probably the new Oracle.

chrshawkes 6y ago

You prefer skinny jeans and beards, I gotcha!

thorwasdfasdf 6y ago

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.

golergka 6y ago

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?

andrewflnr 6y ago
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_to_ditch_oracle_by_2020/e3p9zvc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/950n15/amazon_...

deleted 6y ago

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jbverschoor 6y ago

What?? HP is THE center of Silicon Valley. Ok it used to be, but so many things came from HP and the whole culture.

drannex 6y ago

> produces more technological advancements than Silicon Valley Boston would say otherwise.