What makes MIT or Stanford amongst the best engineering schools in America? What makes Harvard, Yale, and Colombia the top tier of liberal arts universities? Why are Florida's, Ohio State's, Texas', and USC's football teams consistently ranked in the top 10? It's all very simple if you understand what they have in common.
Let's talk about the MITs and Harvards of the world. Are the laws of chemistry appreciably different at MIT versus your local community college? Nope. Does MIT use a better chemistry textbook? I doubt it - you'd be surprised how few textbooks in any field are used across the country. Professors? Yes, there's a good chance your chemistry professor at MIT won a big, prestigious award or prize until you realize the person actually teaching the class is a grad student who's only doing it to keep his research grant. No, the real reason MIT, Harvard, Stanford et al are at the top of their game is competition. Didn't know students were competitive? Every bit as athletes just more subdued.
Competition amongst the students at top tier universities is fierce and that stems from the fact the students want to be the smartest person in the room. Whether it's computer science, physics, 18th century French literature, or marine biology, students want to be the resident expert in their respective field. That motivation forces them to learn more than is taught in class, to turn a class project into a mini-thesis, and to work 48 hours straight simply to prove somebody wrong. When groups of students gather together and focus their competitive energies is when things really start to heat up. You'll notice a lot of innovative research comes out of these groups of students. One of my favorites is the bionic tuna that a team of students at MIT put together.
Now you understand why USC can recruit any high school football player
in America it wants. A hotshot high-school quarterback wants to
compete against the best and see how good he really is; USC affords him that opportunity. Because USC can get the best players at almost every position and has a great coaching staff to boot, the USC Trojan football program is a powerhouse. Competition, in academics or athletics, is what makes universities great.
As an aside, I think one of the biggest marketing frauds in America is how universities have convinced teenagers that they have to get into the right school because their future success is guaranteed. It's complete bullshit of course - where you get your undergraduate education doesn't really matter. However, thousands of young Americans put themselves into perilous levels of debt getting an education. Trust me, it doesn't matter if you earned your marketing degree at Dartmouth or Delaware (grad school is a different story.)
If you're still with me, congratulations - my ramblings do have a purpose. Jeff Haynie posted on his blog that the West Coast is a performance-based social economy and the South is a relationship-based social economy. An interesting hypothesis and in my experience, very accurate. Before moving to Atlanta, I lived in Seattle and know a number of people living in Silicon Valley. The very best programmers/sysadmins/network engineers only care about what you know and what you've accomplished. Dressed in Goth and listen to death metal? They don't care. Come into work after attending an all-night rave? Could care less. Major contributor to Firefox? Very impressive. It has its limits though - don't advertise yourself as a Republican looking for a job on the West Coast or that you prefer *gasp* Windows to MacOS. They do have their standards to uphold after all.
The bar for technical talent is very high on the West Coast because of - stop me if you know the answer - competition. The technorati are competitive amongst themselves to come up with the newest, greatest gadget or website. It's a friendly competition in many ways because the technorati don't view each other or other companies as "the enemy" because the programmer working at the other company is like yourself, interested in the latest cool stuff, and besides a geek needs other geeks to impress with his/hers latest cool stuff. That's why Microsofties listen to their iPods and use Google for search - they want to use the best and if Microsoft's products don't match up they'll say "Sorry - you can't expect me to use our inferior steaming piles of shit to get my job done just because another group can't get their act together." If you know your stuff and you can produce (i.e. performance), the social network grows because smart people like other smart people and they really like smart people who can get something done.
The West Coast is also more forgiving of failure. Failure doesn't mean you aren't smart or can't produce. So what if your last venture didn't work out. Failure is a badge of honor worn by many successful people and the failure means you've learned what not to do - on somebody else's dime. Just don't repeat the same mistakes again.
Finally, what can the South and Atlanta learn from all of this? I'm not sure. What I've described about the West Coast is as much a state of mind as anything else and that's what every future Silicon Valley wannabe doesn't understand. Atlanta isn't going to change its way of thinking overnight and any changes are going to be so slight as to be almost imperceptible. However, try try try we must because to do nothing is to ensure we begin a march towards irrelevance.
Lots of stuff going on at world headquarters with some exciting news towards the end of the month but I thought I'd share 
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