None of the whining posts here could possibly be visible without stuff engineered in California. We are the biggest state economy in the country.
So armchair critics, go ahead and do better.
I sat in a restaurant next to one of the professors who invented UNIX.
UNIX, without which the internet could not have evolved to its present state in anything like the time it has, was invented here.
We register more patents than any other state. Just come on out and try to compete with our big California brains.
Here are the companies with tons of people smarter than us. List of tech companies not necessarily headquartered in, but have offices in Silicon Valley. Doesn't even count Genentech.
Adobe Systems Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Agilent Technologies Apple Inc. Applied Materials Brocade Communications Systems Cisco Systems eBay Electronic Arts Facebook Google Pixar Hewlett-Packard Intel Intuit Juniper Networks KLA Tencor LSI Logic Marvell Semiconductors Maxim Integrated Products National Semiconductor NetApp Netflix Nvidia Oracle Corporation Salesforce.com SanDisk Sanmina-SCI Symantec Western Digital Corporation Xilinx Yahoo! Additional notable companies headquartered (or with a significant presence) in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed): 3Com (acquired by HP) Actel Actuate Corporation Adaptec Aeria Games and Entertainment Akamai Technologies (HQ in Cambridge, Massachusetts) Altera Amazon.com's A9.com Amazon.com's Lab126.com Amdahl Apple Aricent Asus Atari Atmel Broadcom (headquartered in Irvine, California) BEA Systems (acquired by Oracle Corporation) Cypress Semiconductor Dell (headquartered in Round Rock, Texas) EMC Corporation (headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts) Extreme Networks E*TRADE (headquartered in New York, NY) Fairchild Semiconductor Foundry Networks Fujitsu (headquartered in Tokyo, Japan) Groupon (headquartered in Chicago, IL) Hitachi Data Systems Hitachi Global Storage Technologies IBM Almaden Research Center (headquartered in Armonk, New York) IDEO Informatica Intuitive Surgical Kerio Technologies LinkedIn Logitech Maxtor (acquired by Seagate) McAfee (acquired by Intel) Memorex (acquired by Imation and moved to Cerritos, California) Micron Technology (headquartered in Boise, Idaho) Microsoft (headquartered in Redmond, Washington) Mozilla Foundation Move, Inc. Nokia (headquartered in Espoo, Finland) Nokia Solutions and Networks (headquartered in Espoo, Finland) NXP Semiconductors Nook (subsidiary of Barnes & Noble) Olivetti (headquartered in Ivrea, Italy) Opera Software (headquartered in Oslo, Norway) OPPO Palm, Inc. (acquired by HP) Panasonic (headquartered in Osaka, Japan) PayPal (now part of eBay) Philips Lumileds Lighting Company Playdom PlayPhone Qualcomm, Inc. (HQ in San Diego, CA) Quanta Computer Quantcast Quora Rambus RSA (acquired by EMC) Samsung Electronics (headquartered in Suwon, Korea) SAP AG (headquartered in Walldorf, Germany) Siemens (headquartered in Berlin and Munich, Germany) Sony (headquartered in Tokyo, Japan) Sony Ericsson SRI International Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle Corporation) SunPower SurveyMonkey Synopsys Inc. Tata Consultancy Services (headquartered in Mumbai, India) Tibco Software Tesla Motors TiVo TSMC Twitter VA Software (Slashdot) VeriSign Veritas Software (acquired by Symantec) VMware WebEx (acquired by Cisco Systems) YouTube (acquired by Google) Yelp, Inc.