Theme: Ethnoculture

MSFT has been a heavy recruiter from India for decades. India has only about a 200M person above ground economy, but that’s still a huge population of at least marginal english speakers to draw from, with low problems of integration into american culture.

Before Microsoft the only sizable employer was Boeing, who heavily employed technical people.

Washington and Oregon were not heavily industrialized during the war era, and did not draw ‘laboring classes’ or ‘underclasses’ in large numbers from the declining agrarian lands.

Also, during the 1950’s and 1960’s it was illegal to move here if you were a ‘person of color’.

For these reasons the northwest is somewhat (for now) idyllic part of the country was insulated from mass importation of the underclasses, and the accompanying racial conflicts between races, ethnicities, and immigrants.

Currently the area is too expensive to import the underclasses. So it’s possible that the area may stay ‘idyllic’ for a few more years. High prices protect regions from underclasses.

The area has been in rapid decline for about six years now, if not eight, due to massive influx of people driving up prices.

Let me promise you something: Microsoft will not succeed in the transformation. It missed it’s window. I don’t know Satya outside of one deal I did. But microsoft has been a 100M a year customer for me and mine, for much of my adult life. And if I know how to collapse that company economically and technologically then some other competitor does.

When that happens …. those tacky buildings in redmond will turn downtown in to slums. And prices, at least on the east side, will do what they did in Boston when the tech boom moved from the northeast to california.

I got out early.

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-so-many-White-and-Indian-people-here