Comments

1
Boeing isn't dying. Boeing Commercial Airlines may be dying but Integrated Defense Services is having a great year.
2
Cutting the University of Washington and other 4 year public universities 28% is insane! All because they're completely scared of taxes. They think education funds can be recovered at the polls. Not enough. But they don't care about that either.

If the state were to do anything that caused a private company in the knowledge economy to immediately lay off 1000 workers, it would be a scandal. To demand that the UW basically lay off over 1000 workers, and to have the state cut over 10,000 jobs in the middle of a recession? Well, better that than raising taxes!
3
Right, Microsoft is dying, that's why they had record revenues in 2007. Come on, we've been hearing that for the past 15 years.

I've also been hearing forever that companies are going to stop using Windows/Office and yet every place I've worked in the past 15 years has a huge investment in Windows/Office, and I work in the IT/.com business.

So if the most technically literate companies are still using Windows/Office for a lot of their stuff what's the likelihood that a real estate office or light industrial company is going to move to something else?

Trust me, I'm not Microsoft fan, but they're going to be around for a long long time.
4
Agreed on research, disagree on Boeing. Not even commercial. They're still the best aircraft manufacturers in the world, and they still employ a ton of people, more than 75,000, in this area. Aircraft has always been an extremely cyclical business, and the cycles don't usually match up to the economy as a whole. The comparison to steel is null. Steel is a commodity.
5
Jonathan, were you around 10 years ago when every day there were dozens of articles about Java and thin clients and how big clunky OSs and running apps on the client was a thing of the past, any minute now?
6
Of course, if Rossi had won, the 31% cut in state funding for UW wouldn't have been in the House budget but in the governor's budget. And the Democrats in the Legislature would have rubber-stamped it because they're beholden to the NEA, not the SEIU and UAW that represent UW staff and TAs.

That's ultimately what's saddest of all -- the Democrats' cozy relationship with K-12 education and the Republicans' lionizing of two-year colleges has left the four year colleges with next to no voice in Olympia. If they had such a voice, they'd long ago have won control over their own destiny (e.g. control over tuition rates).

It's like have a couple where one partner obsessively checks the tire pressure every morning while the other partner is always checking the battery's charge, both thinking they're doing the Most Important Thing to keep the car running properly, neither of them ever getting the oil changed. And then the engine seizes and neither of them think they've done anything wrong.

At this point, the $875/year tuition hike looks like the only way out for UW. Unfortunately, the fools in Olympia are painting this as a "massive 14% increase" and they're refusing to give it to the regents or the leadership. This is ultimately where Emmert will stand or fall as a university president. If he can't get that $875 hike out of Olympia, then the $950K he's being paid (which, honestly, is less than 1% of the total amount being cut) was all for naught, and he should resign post-haste.

But mentioning Detroit is a bit of a misnomer. Detroit is in trouble, but Ann Arbor isn't, because long ago the University of Michigan was given special status in the state constitution. Their share of the state budget is known and can't be touched very easily by the leadership in Lansing. As a result, Ann Arbor is thriving as a research and technological center, much as Pittsburgh has. Would that someone knock some sense into our populace and grant something similar to this for our six four-year schools.
7
I agree with @3, even if home use moves to netbooks based on flavors of linux MS still has lots of server side applications, like Exchange, which will keep them living for a long time. And isn't the Xbox, a MS product, kicking the playstations ass?
8
@3: Jonathan's point doesn't rely on Microsoft "going away." His point is that it's largely done it's thing (made home and office computing affordable and ubiquitous at tremendous profit to itself), and from here on out it's basically trying to maintain its position in a market that is purchasing fewer and fewer personal computers and more and more smartphones and cloud applications.

Look, I don't think Microsoft is going away either, but it's market is going to stop growing and likely will shrink. That hurts its ability to be an economic engine for the region. In the same way that people still buy GM cars and build with steel, the simple continued demand for a product doesn't ensure that the old producers can continue to see the same numbers.
9
And one other thing: Microsoft is closer to IBM than it is to Unisys or even DEC. It may be losing in some of its areas, but it's still pretty robust in most others. It'll never be 1996 there again, but then it'll never be 1981 at IBM again either.

Microsoft and Boeing's silence in this budget fiasco has been deafening. Both rely heavily on UW grads. Surely it wouldn't take much to have Bill Sr and Jr and Ballmer start whispering nice things about Bangalore into the ears of politicians.
10
Lee, how much money did Microsoft make in databases ten years ago? How much do they make today from SQL Server? I think last year they had 14% growth in the enterprise database market that is worth about $20 billion.

How about CRM? They're not as far up the curve as they are with database, but it's a huge market and they have only a tiny piece.

Those who keep talking about "no growth" and harping about home PCs are clueless about the HUGE business software market that Microsoft is just getting started in.

Again, no fan, I think their CRM product is a POS, but eventually they'll get it right and be a major player in that market.
11
I agree 100% with everything you've written. People who can't see the early signs of GM-style trouble with Boeing and Microsoft both need to clean their eyeglasses.

Back in the 70s when Boeing was in trouble, the whole economy of Seattle was tied that one company, and we all suffered. Since then, Seattle and Washington have taken action to diversify itself immensely--part of the reason Microsoft and Amazon and dozens of other companies arose here.

This kind of self-reinvention needs to be an ongoing process, and we are myopic not to keep it on the front burner.

>> I also agree that Gregoire is annoyingly anti-Seattle because she knows we won't vote for the Republican. If only the state Republicans could get their act together and run an old-style conservative who is socially tolerant, I think they'd easily take the governor's mansion. But state Republicans will never do that. So Gregoire's anti-Seattlism continues.
12
Well, it could be worse. You could be here in California, where we're about to layoff over 30,000 K-12 teachers and hit the colleges with yet another funding cut and tuition increase. Much of the state is already in an outright Depression - the urban cores are going to be the last to feel it, but the entire Central Valley and much of the Riverside/San Bernardino region are already there.

Of course that doesn't make it any easier for folks back in Washington, which really ought to know better.

You have two main problems:

1. Scared and clueless Democrats (Gregoire chief among them)

2. The insane 2/3 rule to approve a tax increase. That in particular is the primary cause of California's suffering, and we've had it in place for 30 years. Such rules are designed to create a conservative veto over all public policy - it's how they compensate for declining numbers and shrinking public support.

It would be much easier to fight these cuts had Rossi won, no doubt about it. Instead Gregoire is going to preside over the destruction of the state, and hand the keys to Rob McKenna in 2012.
13
Hmmm. Not quite with you on this, Science. At least not the Boeing and MS comparisons. You're spot on about education funding, however.

Boeing tends to be a lagging indicator because of the long lead-time in aircraft orders. The airlines are hurting bad right now, and that will reflect in fewer airplane orders and more cancelations next year. Expect large Boeing layoffs in a year or so. But when the economy picks back up, there are only two places in the world to buy large commercial jetliners, and Boeing has always bounced back faster than Airbus. Airbus does not have the capability to ramp up its production as fast as Boeing can, and it looses orders when the boom hits because it can't keep up.

I predict that in about a year, Boeing will look like it is about to close its doors. But in about 5 years, it will be cranking out planes at a pace triple what it is today.
14
Come on, academia has taken two great concepts-- research and education-- and exploited America's fondness of them to the hilt. Your average UW professor teaches six hours a week, and supposedly spends the rest of the week "researching". For every meaningful research study there are ten exploring redundant topics that will get published in academic journals that sit in the bottom floor of the university library. Nobody wants to question the excessive waste of the ivory tower, because to do so would bring forth accusations that one hates research and education.
15
The sad thing is that people would be willing to sacrifice to sustain what they do in fact recognize as the source of their wealth. Most in Washington have long reaped the benefits of high technology enterprise, from the Grand Coulee reclamation and power generation project and the BPA in the 30's, the beginnings of aluminum manufacturing, and Hanford in the 40's, the rise of Boeing during and after the war, to Microsoft and beyond.

The core of our economic identity has relied on state of the art technology profitably applied---nearly all of it government funded.

It would seem that especially now, with the world as capable of selling to us the products of its new found technological mastery as we once were to it, it shouldn't be too hard for the state leadership to generate political capital on the notion of spending public money to reinvigorate the tech leadership cash cow. Were not fools; we can still figure out on which side our bread is buttered.
16
@14: I agree. The cuts should target primary research that never pans out, which would leave only the primary research that eventually brings useful or at least usable results. With this simple spending cut, we save millions. Next on the agenda: pi = 3.0.

As for "teaching six hours a week," that's classroom time. And six hours a week of classroom time is easily 25-35 hours a week of work. I think people who have less experience with academia have a false understanding of how much work is involved in something like a 1.5 hour class for advanced undergraduates.

Beyond that, faculty are expected to participate in departmental or collegiate governance, peer review articles in their area of expertise AND do original research. There's a reason many university faculty never make headway on their research until they have time off from their "six hours a week" of teaching.

Yes, there's waste in institutions of higher education, just as there is in any organization on that scale.
17
The funny thing about Microsoft is that, in a way, it doesn't really matter how well the company is or isn't doing in its own markets. I mean, from a state economy perspective, it's nice to have Microsoft as an employer. But, for most of its history in the state, that hasn't been Microsoft's most important role in the local economy; it's most important role in the local economy has been as a medium for communicating two waves of stock bubbles (tech and dot com) into working capital in this region. Not every state enjoyed the explosive growth that Washington State did during the '90s, and the difference wasn't Microsoft paychecks -- it was Microsoft employee stock options. Which program has been significantly curtailed in the last five years.

As far as that goes, Golob's exactly right. Microsoft the company may be doing fine. But Microsoft the freakish cash cow -- which was really Microsoft's role in our economy for most of its history -- has gone the way of the rest of the bubble businesses. And that will, inevitably, alter our economy for the worse.
18
What makes Jonathon Golob think Rossi wouldn't have put us in the same position given the circumstances? Until this state gets over the idea that there can be a free lunch, ie, that we don't have to pay taxes to get what we want, we will always have problems. The state also needs to get over raising its entire revenue in sales taxes, which are killing to low income people like me. It's time for the state to move into the 21st Century.
19
Golob --

A few tips if you're going for a "most commented" post:

1. Brevity
2. In addition to false extrapolations, add some shrill (ECB can coach you on this)
3. Do not post after 4 p.m.

Best of luck
20
@18

So... the two big things that the state needs to do in order to improve our future prospects are:

1) Accept that taxes are a necessary and important part of civic life; and
2) Stop taxing you.

Check.

Just out of curiosity, when the rest of us realize that there's no such thing as a free lunch and start paying more taxes, while simultaneously eliminating taxes that affect you, will you keep making use of the services provided by our tax dollars? Like, say, if we had a program to provide free lunches?
21
The "microsoft is dying" line has been repeated for at least a decade now, and shows no evidence of being true.

Beyond the Xbox, Sharepoint is a multi-billion dollar product that was released in the past decade and windows mobile gains market share slowly.

That's a pretty pitiful analysis of the software market.
22
A kind of technological Darwinism. Increasingly, what benefits mankind will benefit a local economy. Any city that chooses too few and retrograde business developements whose benefits are to only a few special interests, will suffer slow death.
23
I'll chime in, since I'm a loyal Slog reader in Pittsburgh. This has been a point of conversation here, but not that much. We've done this all before, and we're stubborn enough to just keep our heads down and plow through.

The idea that after the steel industry collapsed we turned to recession proof industries (education and health care) seems to be the prevailing one. Between our college corridor and the fact that UPMC is our larged employer, it seems very fitting.

We still have a lot to work through and improve though, our mass transit is in desperate need of an overhaul and we just spent an insane amount of money on city garbage cans. And while we're all a bit worried about this downturn in the economy, it does feel like it did before (from what I've been told), so we just kind of keep going.
24
a haiku

Boeing;
going...going...
25
Seattle needs to get more involved with growth industries. I hear guns and drugs are good.
26
Ode to MicroSoft.

Micro;
teeny-tiny, small, stunted.
Soft;
flaccid, limp, emasculated.

I lust for a large hard juicy Apple.
27
microSoft isn't going anywhere.
28
The auto industry has being in retraction for a long time. It was almost 20 years ago when we started hearing stories about the death of Flint, Michigan. I can't say I feel bad for Detroit, because the writing has been on the wall for so long. The city did nothing to invest in future economic development. And now its drowning. Talk about a supreme lack of leadership. Good for Pittsburgh, though. I thought about moving there before I met my wife.
29
OMG U GAIZ MSFT IS FAILING!!!!

http://tinyurl.com/ddggcr
30
@18

I don't think it's that he thinks Rossi wouldn't have cut taxes, I think his point is that if Rossi was currently yielding the scissors, at least we/he could operate under the principal that there is an alternative.

As it is with the Democratic majority, it's non-responsive and short sited stupid on top of stupid. Social agency cuts, school cuts, approving a tunnel, obstructing light rail....where's the alternative?
31
Clouding computing vs. Netbooks. I don't think the fight is over just yet.
32
I dunno about Boeing dying. Nationalism and the military industrial complex require a bare minimum of arms manufacturers. Boeing is included in that bare minimum. They won't be allowed to fail.
33
Sounds like we need a hockey team.
34
Golob:

"one of the finest public research universities"
"No other public university"

Just go ahead and say it: JHU is #1 and UW isn't.

Drop the "public" qualifier and do Daniel Coit Gilman and Milton S. Eisenhower proud. Then let's go get a beer at PJ's.
35
@34: I am a JHU alumni.

UW is the better training environment.
36
You've done very well making arguments that don't really hold up to any real scrutiny and did so by not providing any timelines or numbers.

To wit: How much of Microsoft's revenues come from home consumers as against business licenses? That should be a basic underpinning of your argument and is readily available.

How much are their revenue projections based on this segment versus the others. Yeah, you're blogging for an alternative weekly and don't have to back anything up with analysis, numbers, etc., but why not provide some substance to give your arguments heft?
37
"DON'T TRIM *OUR* FAT !!! DON'T TRIM *OUR* FAT !!!"

We're all in this together. We all get a chance to slim down.
38
I used to do cloud computing and then the Sun came out.
39
Cheer up, you just got a nice new light rail system. That counts for something.

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