I'm not sure there is a "next", at least not in the U.S. I think the Boomers and the venture capitalists have pulled the ladder up for good.

Silicon Valley dying (and slowly) does not mean that a B-list city will replace it. I wish it were otherwise, because we have a lot of infrastructure and a hell of a lot of talent that's still in the B-list cities. However, I don't see much hope for most of those places. I wish I were wrong about that, but when the spirit is crushed it takes a long time for it to come back.

Corporate America "proper" (i.e. Fortune 500s outside of banking and elite startups) is in decline, because most corporations don't exist for any purpose other than their own mindless growth at this point. Talented people don't give a shit about the default corporate mission (make rich people richer) and move through them seeking their own career goals, not caring (and why should they?) what really happens to the firms as they go. The end result of this is documented by the "Gervais Principle" analysis of Venkatesh Rao, and I continued the analysis in the "Gervais / MacLeod" series on my blog.

The "big reveal" for those of us who came of age in the past 10 years is that VC-funded "startups" are just an outgrowth, and an especially dysfunctional one, of this uninspiring system. VC-istan isn't an alternative to corporate serfdom. It's a newer and generally worse form of it: shittier benefits, less investment in employees, faster firing, worse career paths, more ageism and sexism and classism. I would actually prefer the old corporate system (with at least some investment in the employee's career) seen in larger banks and hedge funds, but after having worked in tech (where most jobs become pointless after a few months, thanks to constant reorgs and broken promises) for 8 years, I've had "too many" jobs and the hedge funds aren't really an option anymore.

The big problem with the VCs is that they play outside of companies in ways that would be illegal if their interactions were more documented. They collude. Even if you refuse to take VC funding, they can still destroy you by funding your competition. What they really are is a social network designed for insider trading of marginal, non-public microcaps. One of the reasons why they prefer to fund companies in their geographic areas (and, also, why VCs outside of the Valley and New York will never really matter) is that much of their collusion would be legally dangerous to them if it happened in writing, rather than informally and socially within a closed network of people they trust.

Here's why I think the future outlook is grim. The Soviet system destroyed the entrepreneurial spirit of several countries for generations. (The reason Russian business is so tightly intertwined with crime is that the people who retained that know-how were the black-marketeers.) It didn't spring back in a year or even ten, and it wasn't without some nasty conflicts even 20+ years after the Soviet system was formally gone.

The American corporate system, culminating in the VC-funded clusterfuck we see every day in Valleywag, has had similar effects. Although its decline is evident, peoples' spirits have been so thoroughly crushed that I don't see a replacement coming for at least a generation.