Living and working in Redmond, Washington, I realize the dominance Microsoft has on this town, and this region in general. My ride to work takes me past blocks upon blocks of entrances to Microsoft buildings all the way down 148th Avenue. They are an economic powerhouse, creating thousands of jobs, and generating a Metric Load of cash for Redmond, King County, and the State of Washington.
That aside, I'm getting kind of tired at the dominance of Microsoft technologies being foisted on Washington because of their location. Everywhere you look around here, you see someone expounding on the Latest Microsoft Innovation, something the rest of the technology community likely saw from a different manufacturer five years early, and it's coming out as the greatest thing since sliced bread. The latest one that irritated me was Origami, the modern day Newton, with a fat processor and a big operating system, effectively defeating the purpose of the device. Luckily, they don't seem to be selling well. They made the same mistake as Apple: the base system is nearly $1000, and it only goes up from there.
I could go on and on about individual pieces of technology, but the main reason I went off on this rant is a huge banner ad on the Seattle Times' web site. This guy, Brier Dudley, is the official Seattle Times Blogger on "technology and business affecting the Northwest". That's a pretty broad category. I mean, we have Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and thousands of dot coms, startups, and a few really large companies with a big base of operations here. Sure, there's Microsoft, but there's also Amazon, T-Mobile, Cingular Wireless, a large chunk of Google, and a ton more. More than that, the tagline is "affecting the northwest", which means that all of the competitors of these companies, as well as designers of systems that support the Northwest would be included as well. You could include companies which rely on major pieces of technology to operate, like Boeing. Their headquarters may be in Chicago now, but their manufacturing, and their very spirit is right here in Washington.
Yet, go look at his blog. It consists of entry after entry about Microsoft and what they put out. A lot of it is positive, some of it asks some questions or pokes some fun, but there's very little 'blog opinion', and it reeks of regurgitation of other news sources a few days late. It's only been around for two months, so it's easy to see the direction this person has taken -- in fact, he wrote about Microsoft for five years before starting this blog for the Seattle Times. As of this post, there are 14 entriers on the front page, 10 of them have to do with Microsoft, or an executive at Microsoft. Rounding out the other four is a small commentary on Enron, a shot at Blu Ray based on commentary from a dev with the Xbox group (I didn't count this as a Microsoft entry), words about Google's growth, and some words about Google and Dell, and why Dell didn't go with Microsoft.
If you click to the other technology blogs from the other bloggers at the Seattle Times, you see a lot of the same theme. Even the articles that aren't about Microsoft seem to reference them somehow, or are remarkably light on details, fact checking, or why the entry is relevant.
So, in fact, a typical blog posting.
And now I'm self conscious.
