My economic platform as president of the US would be to institute an advanced cloning program to duplicate Steve Jobs and replace the heads of the Fortune 100. I would call this "The De-Sculleyification of America" or "The No CEO Left Behind Act".

Q: Is this common in the industry?

A: Look at Microsoft (MSFT ) -- who's running Microsoft?

Q: Steve Ballmer.

A: Right, the sales guy. Case closed. And that's what happened at Apple, as well.

Ouch.

from Rise of Sillicon Valley

Steve says " Microsoft has no culture, they just make third grade products."

Just out of curiosity, is Apple really that popular in Silicon Valley?

In the places where I've lived, Apple was/is not much of a player at all particularly since the 1990s.

I find it peculiar that there are so many Apple-related posts on YC News!

I think you've answered your own question. :)

4-5 years ago, a friend was entering the CS program at the University of Washington (AKA Microsoft's back yard). He picked up a spiffy new dell laptop. A month or so later, he sold it and bought a powerbook. A disproportionate number of the CS students used Macs back then, perhaps even the majority.

So, I'm guessing, yeah, they are pretty popular in SV too.

I am seeing an increasing number of engineers switching to Apple @home while continuing develop under Windows only because their employer uses it.

Also, more and more technical books have screenshots in them done using Mac. While I can't say Apple is "popular", I can certainly say that Mac is getting more popular.

Actually those technical books you mentioned are always around Web Development, Ruby on Rails, HTML/CSS.

Most of Web Designers have background in Graphics Design. Graphics Design use Mac.

Ruby on Rails developers (most of them) use Mac thanks to the hype and the shiny screencast made by DHH.

While the last reason might not be important, it also has some effect to certain degree to books; IE6/WinXP theme looks old (same thing with IE6/WinXP classic theme) while Safari looks much nicer in those web development books. Basically people need fresh air that's all. It's not that Mac is better.

Did you know that Yahoo! Mail doesn't work in Safari?

Perhaps it's only in Silicon Valley. The place where I live, people don't care of Apple or Web 2.0 that much. They use computer to browse news, check e-mail, YouTube and Friendster/Facebook/MySpace because they can see the hottest chicks or guys around their environments.