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Microsoft to Expand Campus, as Amazon Looks Elsewhere
While Amazon is hunting for a second headquarters away from its hometown, its neighbor in the Seattle area — Microsoft — is doubling down on the region, with plans to invest billions of dollars in redeveloping its existing campus.
The project, which Microsoft plans to announce at its annual meeting of shareholders on Wednesday, amounts to a major overhaul of the company's 500-acre campus in Redmond, Wash., the leafy Seattle suburb that it has called home since 1986.
The company will take a wrecking ball to 12 old buildings, replacing them with 18 taller ones with more open work environments. The construction will add about 2.5 million square feet of new space to the roughly 15 million it has in the area, enough room for an additional 8,000 employees.
Microsoft's redevelopment, which will take five to seven years to complete, would not ordinarily stand out — lots of technology companies outgrow their offices and need new space. But this is Microsoft, a company that spent years fumbling new initiatives, laying off employees and retrenching from key markets. The bet on a bigger, more modern campus is a symbol of its resurgence over the past few years under its chief executive, Satya Nadella, who has made invigorating Microsoft's culture one of his top priorities.
It is also hard not to notice the contrast to Amazon, the area's younger and buzzier technology company. After Amazon announced its plans for a second headquarters, cities and regions laid out tax breaks and other promises to lure the planned 50,000 high-paying jobs to town.
Also at VentureBeat and The Verge.
Related: Cities Desperate to Become the Location of Amazon's "Second Headquarters"
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Amazon Receives 238 Proposals for HQ2, Including Multi-Billion Dollar Incentive Offers
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday December 03 2017, @01:04AM (2 children)
Do you think the architects and construction workers of Seattle will say "thank you, President Trump"? The economy there was TANKING under Obama. Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon all moved to Ireland. Now they're coming back. They're bringing thousands of jobs and making huge investments in the USA. When we do the tax cut, it will get even better. Folks, we're doing a MASSIVE cut to the corporate tax. My taxes, believe it or not, will go up. They'll go up hugely. So our great corporations will BRING BACK their money. So, thank me and thank our terrific Republicans in Congress!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Pav on Sunday December 03 2017, @02:00AM (1 child)
As an I.T person one would expect you to think systemically. After WWII America was not only funding its own welfare state, but also that of Europe and Japan through the Marshall Plan and other aid programs. This was to give the rest of the world liquidity and create a world market that could buy Americas surplus production. All of this "world socialism" created the liquidity to turn Americas wartime prosperity to peacetime prosperity as the G.I's came home looking for employment. This was why postwar marginal tax rates in the US were 90%. High taxes do the same within an economy - it redistributes wealth so a high growth economy can exist. The wealthy produce a surplus, and the poor are in deficit... if that flow of weath isn't balanced through redistribution eventually the real economy runs out of money, leaving a few mega-rich unwilling to invest because the average peasant has so little wealth as to not be worth the effort. This has already happened in conservative areas of America where there has been lower tax and more austerity - Walmart is even leaving town.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @08:17AM
That's not a good description of the Marshall Plan.
A good description would be "blackmail".
**Do what USA.gov wants or we'll do to your place what we're doing to East Germany (propaganda, sabotage, and murder).
If you have any notions about anti-Capitalism, we'll not only not have healthy trade|relations with you, well throw a blockade on you** (as USA did to Cuba years later).
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