Space beach made of mother boards.

I'd say it will be some time before we resemble Detroit as within the next hundred years the northwest will likely be one of the few habitable regions of North America.

VCs do not have the kind of cash that can sustain long and really risky research. Their kind of money is mostly good for helping a company with developed products make the leap to IPO.

You are conflating two things here - "long" and "risky". Certainly, VCs don't do long very well, but risky? They're whole model is to make money by investing in lots of high-risk startup ventures with the hope of hitting the jackpot every once in while. They do make late stage investments as well, but these are still risky, and the rewards aren't as great. If a rich guy is looking for relatively low risk investments, he'll turn to real estate and equities markets, not VC.

As for VC money in Seattle, there's never been as much as in Silicon Valley, and much of what there was has dried up because the local firms weren't picking enough winners.

Detroit was a one industry town. Seattle has a lot more going on than just "cloud".

Cloud computing is just a glorified term for back end servers running virtual machines (computers) that folks can use from anywhere made possible by better and faster connectivity, security, and a programmability. This basic paradigm existed ever since Compu-Serve in the 90's. Nobody's going to "own" the cloud - that's just hype.

One of the interesting things is that the actual server farms are not here in Seattle, but are spread throughout the world. While Amazon has a considerable presence here the "industrial" side of their business is largely elsewhere.

@5 Cloud computing is a bit more than that. Yes, virtual servers are an important part, but there have also been real advanced in workflow management for distributed computing. It isn't just that the work is being done remotely, but the work can be automatically scaled to dynamically allocated machines the world over all while maintaining a cohesive state to ensure all the work is completed and little is duplicated.

Amazon Workspaces may be just a glorified dumb terminal server, but for example S3 and DynamoDB are quite interesting.

Marvel at my ability to compartmentalize my growing admiration for Amazon's cloud enterprises and my disdain for their retail operations.

#6

Owning a cloud is like...well, owning a cloud.

The tighter you hold, the more it escapes your grasp.

Meh, in 50 years or so when the global economic and energy infrastructure collapses due to the massive, unchecked CO2 "greenhouse effect", we'll just go back to being another sleepy little fishing-and-lumber village - assuming there are still any fish or trees left to harvest.

Charles, If I didn't know better I'd think you hate seattle and living here and wonder why you stay.

@7 It's all fun and games during the early days, then one day you turn around and there's a monopoly in your face.

This kind of reminds me of Microsoft's early days of investing and forcing the standardization of the desktop OS and apps. Strongarming everyone else in the marketplace can generate legal and public backlash once you're on top, but not so much during the creation and buildout phase. Amazon seems to have learned a lot from the Microsoft libertarian business playbook.

Read an article recently (can't find it right now), that talked about the large percentage of companies that are opting to use Amazon's cloud services instead of building their own. I'm sure that will go swimmingly when Amazon wants something from a company running on their cloud...

"That's a nice book/accounting system you have here, it'd be a shame if anything happened..."

Gee, how wonderful would it be for all these spin-offs and hanger-oners (as well of the rest of us) to have Google Fiber. If any of our nearby cities would put two and two together, and marry real transit with Google Fiber, well, Seattle would have competition. Never gonna happen. Suburbs gonna hate, even if it costs them.

@6 is right. If you're going by the servers themselves, the center of the universe is someplace like Moses Lake -- someplace outside of the Puget Sound earthquake zone, flood zone and nuclear blast zone.

But you wouldn't want to live there.

y would we go by the location of the servers? the whole point of the cloud is remote functionality, no? the honchos controllin it (and replacing the servers as needed) run tings from Seattle. I'm in gangs.

@ Charles: yes if these industry insiders had only read a book about how important the state had been to the most capital-intensive aspects of internet development, they would understand that private enterprise had not been especially significant to subsequent breakthroughs NOT!!! ha gotcha

the USSR was very good at inventing big, important tech, too. "missile gap", space race win etc were awesome. the trouble is that they never achieved diffuse affordability. markets r good at this. the first iphone was 6 hundo in 2005 or whatever. the new smartphones r better and much cheaper. mixed private sector and active state r mportant