Weakness of education system, high cost of living make it hard to attract top workers

The region that gave birth to such legendary high technology startups as Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco Systems may be seeing some of its influence wane, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, said Wednesday. Though Silicon Valley was once unparalleled as the natural home of high technology startups, things have changed in the nearly 40 years since Moore, along with Robert Noyce and Andy Grove founded Intel. "It's uniqueness is not as great as it was in the beginning. Other areas have picked up on the technology," Moore said of the region. "Now it's spread around to a lot of other places." China, for example, is fast rising as a technology player, he said. "We have very formidable competition in the world. I think the impact of China is just beginning to be felt," he said. "China is training 10 times as many engineers. ... Their technology is catching up fairly rapidly. It's a very entrepreneurial society." Chief among the challenges ahead for Silicon Valley is the relative weakness of the U.S. public education system, which Moore characterized as a problem for the entire country, and the San Francisco Bay Area's notoriously high cost of living, both which are making it harder to attract top workers. "It's so damned expensive, especially the housing. It's hard to move young people in." The median price paid for a Bay Area home was $534,000 in January, according to real estate research firm DataQuick Information Systems.