Seattle Is the Next Detroit

Henry Ford and Detroit radically changed the economic geography of the world. Now, Jeff Bezos and Seattle are poised to do the same.

Theme: Economic geography

Subject Article: "Amazon growing faster than ever — adds record 18,000 workers in quarter to top 183,000 globally."

Other Links: 1. "Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America."
2. "The Second Machine Age Is Dying."
3. "Amazon’s unprecedented growth is too risky for Seattle."
4. "Census: Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in the U.S."
5. "Seattle’s population boom approaching Gold Rush numbers."
6. "American Experience Transcript: Henry Ford."
7. "Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley."
8. "American Experience: Silicon Valley."
9. "‘The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies.’"

Postscript: Amazon will remake economic geography in more ways than just the cloud:

Amazon has been investing heavily in the logistics needed to extend all the way through its delivery chain. It is buying its own truck trailers, hiring on-demand delivery workers and building a new type of delivery hub — with technology that has thus far been kept under wraps — in major cities from Seattle to New York.

Analysts believe door to door delivery could be the next big sector that Amazon disrupts, in the same way it shook up cloud computing services by launching Amazon Web Services.

“The logical next step is, if you are going to have all this infrastructure, why not open it up to be a competitor to logistics networks like FedEx and UPS,” says Scot Wingo, executive chairman of ChannelAdvisor, a software provider for retailers that use Amazon and eBay. “I fully believe it’s something they could go after and be successful at.”

AWS is a much bigger disruption than the reinvention of logistics. In fact, the cloud allows Amazon to take on FedEx and UPS, dominating online retail. For now, I thinking AWS will shape where we work. A new type of delivery hub could shape where we live.