1 MILLION more in the Seattle area by 2030 (Snohomish: homes, prices)

[aerotive]

Originally Posted by usernametaken

tudorjason,

Washington's population is 6.7 million. If the state gains 1 million each decade, you must be just talking about the past two decades.

As an aside, what if Microsoft Windows becomes obsolete? Isn't that very likely? What if the world shifts to some kind of free MS Office type product? What if China starts producing large commercial airplanes (even just for its own national airlines)?

One can only hope. Would be terrible for the greater Seattle region but a huge positive for society as a whole. No more Windows tax, most everything technology related would happen faster and be cheaper. They lucked into their OS monopoly ~ 30 years ago and have been riding that ever since. It's made them fat and lazy, with awful products and a legendarily dysfunctional corporate culture.

Some parts of the eastside might very well devolve back into forest..

[Ira500]

Originally Posted by aerotive

One can only hope. Would be terrible for the greater Seattle region but a huge positive for society as a whole. No more Windows tax, most everything technology related would happen faster and be cheaper. They lucked into their OS monopoly ~ 30 years ago and have been riding that ever since. It's made them fat and lazy, with awful products and a legendarily dysfunctional corporate culture.

Some parts of the eastside might very well devolve back into forest..

It would be awful for all those Microsoft people to lose jobs, but the idea of deer grazing where Bellevue Square mall once stood has it's appeal.

[Xanathos]

Oh, the irony. Button pushers who lament and moan endlessly about their jobs being sent overseas because they are no longer needed advocating a move to a society where all software is free and nobody should have to pay for the works of others.

And no, I don't work for MSFT, I just find it more than a little hypocritical for a society whining about how there aren't enough jobs in the same breath talking up the concept of software developers working for free.

[aerotive]

Windows & Office becoming obsolete doesn't require programmers to stand in soup lines. There are other possibilites between that rather stark vision and the terrific inefficiencies & costs that the Microsoft model imposes.

[Xanathos]

Originally Posted by aerotive

Windows & Office becoming obsolete doesn't require programmers to stand in soup lines. There are other possibilites between that rather stark vision and the terrific inefficiencies & costs that the Microsoft model imposes.

I'm not going to get into a philosophical debate over the concept of Microsoft vs. open source (there are reasons why Linux only has a 1.5% marketshare in the desktop OS market, and why Office still reigns supreme worldwide in spite of Oracle's best efforts to push OpenOffice). I'm simply going to state that the belief of some that software should be free and that people with the advanced skillsets to create something like an OS or an office suite out of the goodness of their hearts is pretty ludicrous.

[aerotive]

Open source is one possibility, there are others too. Maybe cloud computing, maybe another company creating another OS that's just that much better, maybe the goverment will butt in and break them up. Maybe something else. Maybe nothing will be able to overcome the accumulated effects of decades of Microsoft's monopolist tactics, along with the strong network effects of their particular niche. The prospect of another few decades of bad, backward, self serving technologies is a dismal one though.

[Xanathos]

Originally Posted by aerotive

Open source is one possibility, there are others too. Maybe cloud computing, maybe another company creating another OS that's just that much better, maybe the goverment will butt in and break them up. Maybe something else. Maybe nothing will be able to overcome the accumulated effects of decades of Microsoft's monopolist tactics, along with the strong network effects of their particular niche. The prospect of another few decades of bad, backward, self serving technologies is a dismal one though.

See, calling their software bad just shows you're an ideologue that's got a bias against the company. Anyone who works in depth with their software realizes that it's actually quite good (excluding Vista and 2000/ME). And as an ideologue, one has to take your view of what will happen in the future with a certain degree of skepticism, because you're doing more hoping than you are thinking critically. The reality is Microsoft is either the 2nd or the 3rd largest company on the face of the planet, depending on what metric you use. They've been there for quite some time, and there is nothing on the horizon that's going to unseat them from that perch (you mentioned cloud computing, which I found kind of odd - do you think things in the cloud don't use software or OS's?). Microsoft has reached the exact same level that Cisco, Ebay, etc. have. That being of a perpetually dominant market player that nobody can unseat, no matter how hard they try. Their footprint is just too large. A million auction sites better than Ebay have come and gone without so much as a whimper, because everybody just uses Ebay. Juniper has been tilting against windmills forever trying to gain market share from Cisco but they can't do it, because everybody uses Cisco. For all the media hype about Apple and what have you, they have never made a significant inroad in the personal/business/server computing sector, and Linux's market share in the server space is due largely to the longevity of UNIX.

Those companies will always exist and be their respective industry leaders because it's just accepted that they are.

[aerotive]

No company will always exist, the business world just doesn't work like that, not over the long term. Governments and even civilizations fall to old age, changed circumstances, and more vigorous competition...companies are no different.

Nor do I think I'm an ideologue for saying Microsoft's software is bad. It's bad my many objective measures, totally bloated, bug ridden, wildly overpriced, a security nightmare, and built for the purpose of entrenching Microsoft even further. Their most prominent hardware product is as durable as tissue paper. They hold us back by _decades_. They're like East Germany--rotten at the core, trying very hard not to see the world around them, but just passable enough that everyone goes along (for awhile) because initial change would be so painful and costly and wrenching. Eventually Microsoft's monopoly rents will become untenable and the whole edifice will come down. That is what I think will happen and yes, very much what I hope will happen.

Yes cloud computing requires OSes, but they can be very different and very non-Microsoft. Or change could happen via some other route. Or we could trundle along this same crummy path.

[crystalblue]

anywho, back on topic...

which direction do you think most of the growth will occur in?

seems alot goes north south, not too much east?

[eskercurve]

Originally Posted by crystalblue

anywho, back on topic...

which direction do you think most of the growth will occur in?

seems alot goes north south, not too much east?

I think most growth will occur East. There's still plenty of space. If you go to Bothell and go east, there's plenty of land. Going south, towards Auburn, there's space there too but that's getting pretty far away from the city.

Seattle isn't doing anything to improve the south end neighborhoods, so they will likely stagnate. And who wants to move into a not-too-desirable neighborhood? They'd rather build new cities than renovate and try to gentrify an existing one with current market realities.

North end on the West side is pretty well saturated already. That's why eastward expansion is the most likely scenario.