Few places on earth enter the new century and new millennium with more brash confidence than Orange County. Few places enjoy more wealth, more sun or more entrepreneurial energy. Few places can claim to be more of a creation of the post-suburban, globally oriented, technology-driven age. Few, it would seem, are more poised to capitalize on the years ahead.
So what’s to worry about? Well, how about economic disparity? Or quality of education? Or traffic congestion? Or just trying to convince people in the rest of the country that there is a there here, related to but distinct from LA.
We asked 12 well-traveled journalists, academicians and executives to put Orange County into perspective at the turn of a new century and millennium.
Amid Abundance, Seeking Identity and a Technology Giant
For Orange County as a metropolitan center, this turn of the century is its first. Consider: One hundred years ago, the county was pretty much as it had been 100 years before that,an expanse of groves and ranches dotted by a mission and a few trading crossroads. But the new-fangled automobile soon brought vacationers to the county’s coast. Then came moviemakers and oil drillers. World War II ushered in the Santa Ana and El Toro airfields and a wave of GIs. They found the area to their liking, as did Walt Disney and a few pioneers of electronics and biomedicine. And the rest, to modify the old saying, is OC’s meteoric, latter-half-of-the-20th-century history.
Whither OC now? We asked a dozen well-traveled journalists, academicians and executives,almost all of whom do or have in the past made OC their home,for their impressions of the county at this historic turn. We asked them to be as brief as they wished, and as wide-ranging as they liked,compare OC to Silicon Valley or other places, list its strengths and weaknesses, discuss its biggest challenges and opportunities, etc.
The result is an eclectic and insightful collection of observations. They are overwhelmingly positive and bullish, but with a few cautionary and even deflating notes. Here they are:
JIM DOTI
It wasn’t long ago, during the ’90-’91 recession and the subsequent bankruptcy, that most people pretty much wrote Orange County off as an economic disaster area. And now we’re basking in an economic boom that is fueling incredible job and wealth creation. What a difference a few years make!
Orange County is now a diverse, technologically oriented economy no longer dependent on the vicissitudes of defense spending and construction activity. That is why Orange County will continue to prosper in the next millennium.
There is no question that export activity in the county will be a critical engine of economic growth in a number of key sectors, including manufacturing, finance, insurance and real estate. Another important engine of growth that will shape Orange County’s future is its entrepreneurial character. We are a county of recent immigrants from other parts of the nation as well as the world. I have long felt that those people who were willing to uproot themselves from the place they called their home to come to Orange County are entrepreneurial at heart. Not only are they willing to take enormous risks, but they are also astute enough to recognize the attributes of our county.
Orange County is at the nexus of the rapidly burgeoning telecommunications industry. Other high-tech sectors positioned to grow rapidly include medical instruments and information technology, especially in the areas of software development and multimedia. Central Orange County is emerging as a burgeoning center for the production of digital equipment. And the Irvine Spectrum now is the home of more than 2,000 companies that employ almost 45,000 workers in fields ranging from biotechnology to clothing design.
One more prediction: The Anaheim Angels will win the World Series, and we won’t have to wait until the next millenium in the year 3000 for that to happen.
Doti, born and educated in Chicago, is president of Chapman University in Orange.
MIKE LYSTER
As the sun comes up each morning at John Wayne Airport, American Airlines flight 2798 takes off for the hour-long trip to San Jose International Airport.
The first jet out of the gate to Silicon Valley, it is packed with lawyers in suits, engineers in Polo shirts touting company logos, and assorted other tech workers heading to the industry’s mecca. Day after day, the ritual repeats itself, making the Silicon Valley run one of the airport’s busiest.
Lest this exchange seem merely one way, take a glance at the departing-flight screens inside the airport at San Jose. On one monitor, five hourly flights to OC take up more than half the screen. Austin, Texas, a rival tech hot spot, counts only one flight on the same screen.
If all this seems a bit anecdotal, take a look at the performance of OC tech companies on Wall Street this year. Conexant Systems Inc., Broadcom Corp., QLogic Corp. and Emulex Corp. are stars, holding their own against stellar companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
Like Silicon Valley, OC is a patchwork of cities with their own high-tech contingents. Both regions have come into their own in the shadow of higher-profile metropolises, be it Los Angeles or San Francisco.
But besides Silicon Valley’s renown, OC differs from its northern neighbor in another way: a lack of cohesion that divides the county between north and south, new and old, airport or no airport.
Silicon Valley is just as sprawling and disparate, to be sure. But technology is the common dominator. From one end of the San Francisco Bay to the other, you know you’re in Silicon Valley, whether you’re in Redwood City, San Jose or Milpitas.
Maybe technology can do the same for OC.
Lyster, former senior reporter for the OCBJ, is assistant technology editor with Investor’s Business Daily in Los Angeles.
JOEL KOTKIN
Orange County’s great challenge in the new millenium is two-fold: to find ways to become a more cosmopolitan place while breaching the internal “Orange Curtain” that increasingly separates the heavily minority, working-class north from the predominately affluent south.
In a sense, the solution lies in finding points of mutual interest between the two: the south needs the workforce, consumer base, cultural input and demographic dynamism of the north, while the north needs the capital, technology and business savvy of the south.
Kotkin, a native of New York and graduate of UC Berkeley, is senior fellow with the Pepperdine University Institute for Public Policy. He has written widely on global, economic, political and social trends.
BOB ALTER
The new millennium will see the emergence of OC as a leader in the fields of technology and design.
Alter, chairman and CEO of San Clemente-based Sunstone Hotel Investors LLC, was born and educated in New York City and has owned and operated hotel properties around the country.
ROGER YU
My friends ask me what Orange County is like, and I usually respond, with an air of haughty erudition, that it is the next Great American Experiment. Of course, I don’t know what the first great experiment was, but it sure sounds nice.
When pressed, I elaborate: Orange County is emblematic of many of the contentious issues that the U.S. must resolve in the coming century: changing demographics, urban development and sprawl, international trade’s infrastructure (or lack thereof), technology development, defense conversion, race relations, transportation, immigration, migrant workers, fashioning of the Gen-Y generation, inequity in education, erosion of the manufacturing base and so on. Perhaps no other similar-size community could claim to juggle a list of issues as exhaustive as that of Orange County.
And the county has a few weapons in its quest to claim the cutting edge of America’s future. One, it is a “growth market,” with tremendous upside. Few places in the U.S. have the sociological, economic and technological momentum OC has, a sense that something is always brewing.
Another of OC’s weapons is its diversity, a trite term for its conservatives and a condition easily taken for granted by most of its residents. But no city can claim to be the country’s future, without looking like America. And no community will grow economically without having its boundaries, both geographical and sociological, stretched to incorporate the foreign, the alienated, the new. Minneapolis may claim to have the most diverse economy for a city of its size, but its lack of diversity discourages the immigration of young professionals needed to mobilize a dot-com economy.
And for many, OC, with its beaches and temperate weather, is a highly livable place. It is a quality that can’t be overemphasized in marketing for companies and talent.
For all its graces, Orange County, however, suffers from a host of conditions that seem irreversible. The biggest is the perception that OC is merely an extension of, and dependent upon, Los Angeles. It is an inevitable association, since Los Angeles, though nearly as disparate, has a visible downtown business district that it can call its center. Some will argue that the impact of a recognizable downtown is overrated, that the future of American urban development will be non-centric. Maybe so, but no other American community marketing itself as a distinct entity runs nearly 50 miles up and down.
The merits of an El Toro airport will not be reargued here, and I dare not call for another seaport with Long Beach so nearby. But without an international airport to call its own, OC dare not disassociate from Los Angeles.
Yu was born in Korea and raised in Los Angeles. A former senior writer with the OCBJ, he is leaving his position as business reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune to become technology writer for the Seattle Times.
GARY E. LIEBL
As a CEO and participant on many boards throughout my 30-year career in high-technology, I have traveled extensively and visited all 50 states and over 40 countries. As a consequence, I have had an opportunity to participate in a multiplicity of varied business environments and established networks of satellite offices, subsidiaries and joint ventures worldwide. While each location has its own uniqueness and advantages, I have concluded that in its totality, Orange County ranks among the best business environments I have had the opportunity to participate in.
Orange County has the distinction of being the center of the so-called “Tech Coast,” and is one of the best-kept secrets in the global arena of high technology. The Tech Coast represents one of the largest geographic concentrations of technology research, development and commercialization in the world. Orange County, as its nucleus, is a beautiful, young, vibrant business community, hosting hundreds of exciting entrepreneurial startups in the Internet space, software, microelectronics, computer hardware and medical devices. We claim as our own such current successes as Broadcom, MTI, Autobytel, Quest, Conexant, QLogic and PairGain.
Our infrastructure is growing and balanced with excellent banking, legal and accounting services provided by first-class firms, with local and international presence. Even the vital sources of capital are better represented in Orange County today than ever before, as evidenced by the many upstart “angel” investment groups and the increasing flow of venture capital dollars from the national VCs. Most importantly, our county is home to a wonderful, multi-ethnic workforce with a strong entrepreneurial spirit.
As we approach the new millennium, Orange County is postured for explosive future growth and for the global recognition it deserves as a primary home to entrepreneurial growth and innovation.
Leibl, retired chairman of the board of Costa Mesa-based QLogic Corporation, is a private investor and advisor to CEOs and boards of directors.
SCOTT WOOLLEY
Orange County has always had something of an unnecessary Napoleon complex, manifested, for instance, in the editor of this paper’s rabid quest for a bigger airport at El Toro. As a former resident, I vividly recall OCers spending way too much time worrying about what OC isn’t, and not nearly enough time appreciating what it is.
OC wants to be Silicon Valley. It shouldn’t.
There is plenty of tech firepower in Orange County, and less of the annoying excess of Silicon Valley. (Not to say that there is no annoying excess in OC.)
So in the spirit of off-the-cuff millennial prognosticating, here’s my logic for why OCers will soon lose their inferiority complex: Silicon Valley’s natural advantage, that it’s a haven for the best tech talent, is rapidly fading.
As tech talent diffuses around the country and world, how close you are to San Francisco will cease to matter. As the whole country goes Silicon, people will migrate to whatever climates seems best, and trust me, that ain’t San Francisco. So hold onto your real estate and quit worrying about your lack of eBay options. I’d rather have the house in Newport.
San Diego-bred Woolley, former technology writer of the OCBJ, is a staff writer for Forbes magazine in New York.
FRANK JAO
As we enter the 2000s, Orange County is playing an increasingly more important role in the world economy. As the WTO takes shape, OC will continue to distinguish itself from Los Angeles.
Jao, chairman of Westminster-based Bridgecreek Group, is a Vietnamese immigrant with real estate interests in California, Las Vegas and Southeast Asia.
DAN COOK
To me, Orange County was like a lake frozen thick in winter. If you just looked at the frozen surface, you would have one impression. But if you chopped your way through, you’d find something very different, and very good, beneath that layer of ice.
The ice would be all the concrete and steel and “progress” that one associates with Orange County. There’s a lot of truth to that. During my five years in LA and one year with the OCBJ, I came to hate fighting the freeways and watching the chaparral become housing projects and seeing strip malls springing up on every corner. But once I actually worked in OC, I began to see beneath the surface.
I love Portland. It has a strong anti-growth sentiment, and that suits me. But after nearly three years, I still haven’t connected with the people the way I did during my brief stint in Orange County. When we took the kids back to Disneyland in the summer of 1998, we had a great time. I wished then I’d had more time to spend with the OCBJ gang. I wished then I could hop on my bike and ride out to the Back Bay and back. I wished I could stroll down the streets of Balboa Island again.
And now I wonder, how much will the layer of ice change in the next century? And will the lake beneath continue to thrive?
A former OCBJ managing editor, Cook is editor of the Portland Business Journal. He has also worked for publications in Cleveland, Akron (Ohio), Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Miami.
JOHN LONGWELL
To understand Orange County’s place in high tech, you have to look at companies that will play a role in the future. The PC era is passing, and new opportunities are opening in broadband communications, the Internet, mobile computing and services. Broadcom and PairGain Technologies are two chip makers that have a big stake in a high-bandwidth future. While they are not technology companies per se, the county also has a score of online retailers. And there is a little company in Irvine with a sizeable burn rate called Futurelink Distribution Corp., which is pioneering an applications services provider model.
These are among the companies to watch. Orange County has always had its share of high-tech companies, but has never quite reached critical mass as a technology center with a market-leading flagship company. Its strength has been in the number of smaller, entrepreneurial companies that emerge here. With the PC industry’s consolidation, the smaller companies have dropped away, perhaps to Orange County’s disadvantage. But the shift to network computing and the Internet is stimulating a whole new crop of opportunities, and that should bode well for OC’s future.
Longwell, former technology writer for the OCBJ, covers the PC industry as deputy managing editor for Computer Reseller News.
MIKE MASON
No region will ever rival Silicon Valley. It’s all about second place , vs. Austin or Virginia or others. What those areas have, and OC lacks, is a big, internationally known, anchor firm. No Dell, no America Online yet.
But I think the tech landscape is changing in Orange County, for the better. High-speed communications is the rage and, in Broadcom and Conexant, you have two of the up-and-coming communications chip makers. Dwight Decker told me that over time you will see more and more smart engineers leave BRCM and CNXT to start their own firms.
That’s how Silicon Valley grew to dominate, and why it will never relinquish its leadership. There’s just too much talent in the Valley. If Orange County is lucky, the entrepreneurial engineers will stay in OC. But OC needs more talented engineers and a better feeding network than UCI currently provides.
Engineers, engineers, engineers. That’s all the tech executives want to talk about when asked what Orange County lacks. Engineers.
Mason, former technology writer for the OCBJ, is now a reporter with Bridge News in San Francisco.
TOM MOEBUS
The big link between technology and education is the one that has fueled Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, and hopefully will emerge from the University Research Park at UCI in coming years. Orange County is poised to become a major high-technology haven. It is already happening, if you’ve checked the performance of Orange County stocks lately. We are the nexus of some of the hottest technology fueling the nation’s economic success. And coming years will see a number of incubators get started, trying to emulate the success of IdeaLabs, about 50 miles to our north in Pasadena. We’ve got all the makings,a robust economy, a willingness to risk, and a huge untapped reservoir of science and technology here at UCI. Our growth of students will mean that roughly 1,000 new faculty members will come to Irvine to become part of this university. What a tremendous opportunity for UCI to seed its future in the new areas where the most startling discoveries will come,biomedical engineering, cancer prevention, neuroimaging, digital arts, synthetic chemistry, pervasive communications, and so forth. The next Cisco or Broadcom could be gestating right now.
So, as they say in Vegas, “Place your bets.” I’d place mine here in Orange County,the next technology boom area.
Moebus is vice chancellor of university advancement at UC Irvine. He is a graduate and former director of corporate relations for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
