I think it's important to differentiate between the effects the products these companies create have, and the effects the companies themselves have on world/US culture.

Clearly the products have had a profound impact on culture, but I think the impact would have been the same if they had been developed by Exxon or Halliburton.

As far as the cultural impact of the companies themselves, I think it's been modest at best.

> Clearly the products have had a profound impact on culture, but I think the impact would have been the same if they had been developed by Exxon or Halliburton.

But Exxon or Halliburton couldn't have developed these products. They wouldn't even try and fail to develop these kinds of products.

But traditional/non-SV companies can and do change the world with products all the time. IBM was a massive company when they created the PC. VW invented the beetle (and reinvented it). Vanguard changed the world of investing.

None of these were SV startups with all the stereotypes that accrue to them. It's true that it's harder for big companies to innovate, but you can't say, "Only SV startups build products that change the world, ergo SV startups change world culture"

I think your missing the point. The idea is that it didn't really matter who made the product; it was the product itself that had the "profound impact on culture".

The product and the company that created it cannot be separated in terms of origination. The product required those specific inputs to exist. As such, it was the company that created the profound impact on the culture. To remove that connection is to pretend the product could have been created by any given corporation and corporate culture.

Maybe the difference is more subtle than I thought. The culture of a company like Google may be very tolerant and open, it may value self-actualization and support of individuality. This culture could be critical to the creation of Google products, like Search and GMail. It could even be said that products like Search and GMail could _only_ have been created by a company with the cultural values that Google possesses. Other organizations with different cultures may not even have been able to understand enough about how these products work to even try to produce them.

I believe the question is: "Do the cultural values of a company like Google impact the values (or culture) of their customers through their use of Google's products?"

I would argue that no, they do not. People want to find out where they can buy the cheapest dog food or recipes for something they need to cook. For sure, Google's may present articles that they might not otherwise see, but that's as far as I believe this goes; this other content need not be consistent with Google's values (very often it isn't). Ditto with GMail, I wouldn't think the culture of Google, as expressed through GMail, will make much of an impact on their customers at large.

Completely agree. If these companies were impacting the culture as much as their products, entrepreneurship would be the career path dujour, but entrepreneurship rates are actually in decline.

> As far as the cultural impact of the companies themselves, I think it's been modest at best.

Parents staring at their phones instead of paying attention to kids.

Social networks and their impacts on relationships. Movies these days are unrealistic these days because so much important dialogue happens via WhatsApp, text messages and Facebook Messenger, etc.

Guess who will not be driving their own vehicles in 10 or 20 years? Consumers.

Android and iOS phones? They might as well be any generic cheap Nokia, flavour du jour. Did Finnish culture have profound effects on the 40-60% of mobile phone owners at the time?

> Android and iOS phones? They might as well be any generic cheap Nokia, flavour du jour.

Obviously not, or people wouldn't be spending hundreds of extra dollars to abandon their generic cheap Nokias in favor of Android and iOS.

Few consumers spend their discretionary income on Android and iOS phones for reasons related to intrinsic advantages of the platform themselves. They buy Android and iOS phones because those are the two platforms that propagated for what they actually seek: mobile devices. It could just as well have been Symbian and QNX, if competitive forces played out differently. But the whole point is that these goods are completely substitutable. People only rationalize them post facto.

What are these "competitive forces" that aren't consumers choosing some platforms over others? iOS in particular wasn't jammed down consumers' throats; early adopters frequently had to jump carriers to get one, which forced carriers that didn't have the iPhone to accede to Apple's demands of them.

That Android and iOS won via some kind of accident of history is a fairly extraordinary claim, and requires some kind of actual evidence.

That platforms win by consumer preference is a truism that need not be underlined. Android benefited from homogenization by the OHA consortium, and its licensing permitting extensive reproduction by off-the-shelf producers of varying production quality. iOS benefited from Apple's branding and cult following.

What's relevant is that most consumers do not evaluate software platforms from technical and system properties. They seek mobile devices for their end use, and will inevitably steer towards what already has large units stocked, what is advertised and what is recommended via word-of-mouth which will usually create reinforcing loops from consumer impressions caused by the former two. That is to say, the mobile OSes are substitutable goods. Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.

For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance. If it weren't Google, it could have been Altavista or something else. If it weren't Facebook, it could have been MySpace, Friendster or something else. Especially social networks are by definition something that critically depend on Metcalfe's law. Mobile platforms as well, to an extent (largely because apps that people want will converge to them). People do not care that they use Facebook or iOS, they want access to networks of contacts and to communicate with them through a consistent mechanism.

As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.

You're just redefining "technical and system properties" to be things you find important, rather than things the majority of consumers find important.

> Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.

But iOS and Android won by providing superior messaging/browsing/productivity/entertainment, that's the entire point. Nobody is arguing that the kernel in iOS or Android is superior to QNX or Symbian (I have no idea myself, having never looked at the system level of any of those platforms), but rather that iOS and Android provided superior experiences, and that's why they won.

And in a lot of ways, it's the SV culture and its focus on consumer preferences (often mocked as childish and unserious -- "yet another cat photo sharing app") that made it possible for those two platforms to destroy the competition. It turns out consumers really do care if Instagram or Angry Birds is possible or available.

> For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance.

I have no idea where you get so much confidence that alternative OS platforms would have evolved "just the same" -- mobile platforms were a stagnant morass before iOS and (very shortly after) Android came around.

> As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.

"Actual technological properties" here meaning apparently whatever you think is important, and not what actual consumers think is important. User experience is technology. Apple and Google are better at it than Nokia or RIM.

Yes, Android and iOS were the winning ecosystems, there is no argument there.

I was making the point that their influence on culture and society is limited, and using Nokia as an analogy. Nokia was Finnish, yet this didn't have any perceptible impact on its hundreds millions of users. None of them started going to sauna, spontaneously developed cross-country skiing skills or realized that having a summer cottage on a lake is holy grail of life.

And yes, smartphones do have ways in which they can influence behaviour to a larger extent than feature phones, but those too shaped the nature of mobile phone interactions for whole generations.

And most (global) end users are non the wiser that there is a place called Silicon Valley where these devices are designed, just like many people thought Nokia might be Japanese - but didn't know for certain.

Yeah but how many companies actually adopted SV ways and values? Banks are still banks, you still need a suit. Automakers are still automakers, you still need to be there 9-to-5. Investors are still investors, and outside a few precious hubs (SV, NY, Boston) they won't just drop millions on a bunch of nerdy tweenagers with ambitions (unless they're Someone's Child, of course). Politicians talk a lot but the big public-investment moolah still goes almost entirely to large-workforce and well-connected companies.

SV companies influence consumers' lives, sure; but not really how post-fordist capitalism works.

The vast majority of the billions of people using those products have no knowledge of SV, entrepreneurship, or startup culture. It's akin to claiming that filling up the fuel in your vehicle is exposing you to Middle Eastern entrepreneurship and culture.

Can either of them be truly considered "startups" anymore? And Facebook wasn't even invented in SV.

Well if you tautologically redefine "startups" to mean "as yet unsuccessful startups," then no I guess there isn't much effect outside the Valley bubble. But those companies all started small in the Valley and grew exponentially along the classic "tech startup" path.

I would think the poster child for startups are unicorns: Uber, AirBnB, Square, Tesla, etc. Google and Facebook are far too down the line to be considered the stereotypical SF or Palo Alto up-and-coming challenger.

what percentage can even name the cities where those companies are headquartered?