Jim Russell recently published a piece at Pacific Standard that could probably be taken one of two distinct ways. His theory is that Seattle is primed to be the next Detroit. Now, if you're first thought is that Detroit doesn't look so hot these days, you might think this is all doom and gloom. But he actually means it the other way. That Detroit was the American city that dominated in the machine age thanks to it's partnership with a massive game-changing company: Ford. In recent years, it's been Silicon Valley and Intel that dominated the computer age.
Now, he thinks it's Seattle and Amazon who will dominate the technological age thanks to cloud services. Does that mean Seattle is doomed to fall for relying too much on one company (noting that Amazon actually employs more people than Microsoft and Google combined)? Russell thinks cloud services is different enough from the city-driving products that came before it because it separates a link from the workforce and labor demands. The cloud doesn't require workers to actually be in Seattle. Says Russell, "We are living in the world of Jeff Bezos right now." Pretty sure Seattle already knew that.
· Seattle Is The Next Detroit [PS]
· Seattle Is the Detroit of the 21st Century [SLOG]
Loading comments...