Great companies have been started, funded and grown outside the valley. Microsoft, MySQl, Skype, 37Signals, etc. There are more examples than you might think.
Also, while I'm sure there is a lot of engineering talent in the valley it isn't unique. Finland, Denmark, India and the baltic states have awesome programmers and engineers. And they're a lot cheaper, especially in the former eastern bloc.
Not to be mean, but that's like saying "Since Obama was elected president, racism is no more." You can't point to exception cases and be like "all done". You have to look at things in aggregate and at the trend lines. And those things show a preponderance of the necessities for a startup culture in the Valley and in few other places.
I think there's a lot of groupthink going on in the Silicon Valley echochamber. The examples I came up with were just on the top of my head, not outliers in any way. Here are a few more just for kicks.
fogbugz, Alcatel/Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Avid, IBM, Ubisoft, Research in motion, Sierra, Kazaa, Joost, Dell.
The tech-world doesn't revolve around Silicon Valley. There are actually other tech hubs, and there are important tech companies being started in other parts of the world. The valley is important, but not that important.
Great companies have been started, funded and grown outside the valley. Microsoft, MySQl, Skype, 37Signals, etc. There are more examples than you might think.
Also, while I'm sure there is a lot of engineering talent in the valley it isn't unique. Finland, Denmark, India and the baltic states have awesome programmers and engineers. And they're a lot cheaper, especially in the former eastern bloc.