It's Grim and Dim for the Dotcoms

By Chris Taylor/San Francisco

When the going gets tough in the technology capital of the world, the tough take a nap. As blackouts last week hit iSyndicate, a content-creator dotcom in downtown San Francisco, product manager Marina Psaros did just that. "I lost a bunch of stuff I was working on," she said, so she caught up on some of the sleep her kind is forever losing. Not that it helped. "This whole thing is f______ ridiculous," Psaros says. "Come on, it's not like we're living in Romania or something."

On the other hand, Romania doesn't seem like much of a step down right now. And with stock crashes, pink slips and power outages ripping through Silicon Valley like Old Testament plagues, anyone would be forgiven for thinking someone up there wants them out or is at least exacting revenge for all the crummy business plans they wrote.

Nine months ago, the geeks were expected to inherit the earth. Now they consider themselves lucky if they remembered to hit CONTROL-S on their PC keyboards before the screen faded. Once the ruling emotion was IPO frenzy; now it's PG&E fear. The Internet itself is pretty well protected, with most websites housed in generator-filled buildings called data centers. The carefree life of dotcommers who run the websites, however, is not.

Being coolly logical, environmentally conscious types, they were happy last week to do their bit for conservation. Search engine Google turned off all the lava lamps at its ultrahip Mountain View headquarters. Santa Clara-based DSL provider Covad soldiered on without its cubicle heaters. But not everyone coped with equal aplomb: employees at Keen.com in San Francisco were said by their p.r. rep to be "frothing at the mouth" at the possibility that their Ping-Pong tournament, needing optimal lighting for peak performance, might be postponed by power cuts. Some activities are still sacred after all.

Don't expect people who work only with electrons to put up with a shortage of them forever. One thing clearly not sacred is the technology industry's attachment to Silicon Valley--especially since it hasn't built any new power facilities since 1972. That was back when people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still in college. Heck, some of these old geeks have had dates since then.

One endless valley of glass-and-steel towers is pretty much like any other when you live in a wired world, and at some point in a prolonged power crisis, the cost of staying becomes more expensive than the cost of moving. The Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, a powerful lobbying coalition that represents all the big names like Apple, Intel and eBay, says the latest outages have already cost its firms tens of millions of dollars. Losing money at that rate is, like, so 1999.

Group president Carl Guardino even hints that the CEOs he represents are starting to think about relocating if California can't supply the industry with its most indispensable resource. "This is critical; they have to consider all options," he says. Sayonara, Silicon Valley; hello, Seattle or New York. Oh, and the lights are still on in Bucharest. Maybe Guardino's CEOs should sleep on it.

--By Chris Taylor/San Francisco