Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc
^ probably. I went to grad school with several people who wound up in Mountain View and it appears to me that the type of innovation and culture diverges somewhat between SV and SF.
Hold the snark. Apple, Google and so on may have offices in downtown Seattle but that's Seattle, those companies in turn have suburban campuses in Austin which has as much of a young educated and high tech work force as Seattle. Microsoft has an office building in suburban Houston next door to BMG Software and a handful of other tech companies. They go where the people are. In Seattle and Chicago, it's obviously right in town, in Houston and Austin, it's further out.
|
For what it's worth, Google/Austin is fixing to move into 200,000 sq. ft. of a new downtown Austin office building. The building is nearing completion and Google is making major changes to the space it has leased there. Locals are calling this building the Google Tower. It is not much of a tower (just under 400 feet), but it is a high rise in downtown Austin.
Nearby on Town Lake (aka Ladybird Lake) just east of downtown, Oracle is building a sprawling five or six story suburban style building replete with adjacent parking structures to house an estimated 3,000 workers. The surrounding area is rapidly being rebuilt with five or six story Texas doughnut (parking in the center) apartment structures. This development could be considered downtown adjacent and offers many of the same amenities that workers might find downtown. Apple, Samsung, Dell, IBM, Cisco, AMD, Intel, and other tech players mostly continue to operate in suburban office park or industrial park settings, while lots of smaller software developers like to operate from downtown.