I moved to Mountain View to found a startup a few months ago. When I think about the "chat over coffee" type of meetings go, I would say that there may be slightly more of them in San Francisco than South Bay.
It feels like San Francisco starts to outweigh Silicon Valley. I didn't do precise calculation, but estimation based on my gut feelings would say that ratio of "Seed stage" startups between SF and South bay is 2/1.
Yes there are lots of kids in SF trying to get their website turned into the next unicorn. That does not make SF the "center of the tech world", it makes it the "center of the SF tech startup world".
The density of tech startups in SF is much lower, more like New York. Most of them are just retail companies (shops) or food services. Yes, Pinterest, uber, lift, twitter have serious tech problems to solve involving scale, but companies like that are in the minority. And businesses where people develop new technologies are more common in the Valley.
Living in the city and commuting to the Valley was already the norm when I got here in the early 80s.
The point isn't to have a pissing match. I'm simply pointing out that the heavyweight tech region is the San Francisco Bay area but within it the tech influence is unevenly distributed which should hardly be remarkable.
It's easier to find marketing, PR, non-B2B sales folks, web designers, ruby developers etc in SF than down here. It's way easier to find people down here who understand interrupt latency on 32-bit arm cores, oddities of device physics below .14 nm, B2B BD folks and the like. Does one diminish the other? No.
Reporters from outside of course go to SF to report because, frankly, what's to see in Palo Alto? I have lived in Palo Alto for decades and yes, apart from the work (which is awesome) it's dull compared to SF, or even to many places lamer than SF.
Looking at the cars I would guess most of those pictures are somewhere in the 40's/50's.
What? The pictures are clearly older, from 1950-1960s(maybe early 1970s) timeframe. Certainly not 1980s. Look at the cars, the fashion clothes.
You generally don't find many people living outside those 17 square miles pining to move there. Its unique amenities (real and perceived) are easy enough to drive or Caltrain or BART to.
Then again, I'm perplexed that tech companies feel so driven to base so many of their employees in the Bay Area at all. They could save 20%+ on compensation to employees combined with providing them a better standard of living (and more family-friendly as well) by opening workplace options in Beaverton, Bothell, Boulder or Boise.
Plus, those employees would be a bit less immediately accessible for an SV competitor to dangle something shiny in front of.
Back when there were blue collar jobs in Santa Clara County.
There still are.
If you don't think there are blue-collar jobs in Santa Clara county, please explain why restaurants, stores, construction companies, plumbing companies, etc. are able to exist.
Not so much the churn of retail that most large cities (suburban sprawls in this case) have.
I'm not even really sure what these pictures are trying to say, anyways. I don't live in SF, but I've been there a lot, and these pictures don't look much more different from current reality than most large cities between mid-20th century and early 21st. If anything, it may be distinctly less different looking than most.
But it's definitely part of it, now. It got annexed a long time ago.
Even during the last dot com bust it was mostly just marketing companies in sf - all the tech was south of Menlo Park.
I actually really hate that people try to retcpn SF into this visionary of technology and futurism. Almost all of that was and remains in the South Bay, as much as SF startup peeps hate to admit it.