Colorado, its boosters used to claim, could be the next Silicon Valley, that
Bay area bastion of high-technology companies such as Apple, Sun
Microsystems, Hewlett Packard and Intel.
When fans of that viewpoint
looked across the Colorado high-tech terrain in the late 1990s, they saw
headquarters of major telecom and cable companies, data storage giants,
burgeoning software companies, and a crop of brash young Internet firms
not to mention good-sized divisions of some of those same Silicon Valley
behemoths listed above.
It seemed then, after having been jilted repeatedly
by the energy and mineral industries over the decades, Colorado finally had
found a lasting economic relationship with high-tech.
But then came the dot-com collapse of 2000.
It and the economic effects of 2001’s terrorist attacks took a heavy toll on
tech-dependent states like Colorado. From 2001 to 2002 alone, Colorado lost
27,000 high-tech jobs 13 percent of its total tech jobs. Losses continued
in 2003 and 2004.
Last year, however, Colorado’s high-tech industry reportedly reversed the
slide and may have returned to its pre-2000 levels of employment.
“Last
year, I was hearing there were more people than jobs. This year, I’m hearing
more jobs than people,” said Su Hawk, director of the Colorado Software and
Internet Association, which represents what the group prefers to call the
state’s advanced tech industry.
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