Governor Rick Perry announced on Friday that he's giving $21 million over the next decade from the Texas Enterprise Fund to Apple, and (presumably in exchange) Apple will build a $302 million campus near Austin that will create 3,600.Perry is giving it so that Austin can become a high-tech hub. At first thought the idea doesn’t sound particularly crazy (though Apple can obviously afford the campus—Apple misplaces greater amounts of cash under its cushions), but once you really think about it, the idea sounds weird.
It turns out that the jobs created in Austin will be “customer support, sales and accounting” ones. Jobs created are always nice, I suppose, but these jobs are not the makings of a high-tech hub—at least not along the lines of a Silicon Valley. As has been explained several times by now, the key thing that makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is the network of skilled workers and entrepreneurs, universities, and specialized finance. None of the spokes of the network are exactly getting established here (in the high tech sense)—it just looks like a nice corporate giveaway. That’s Texas for you, I guess…
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