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GE's Move To Boston Could Revive Local Tech Business Ambitions (networkworld.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the diversified-community dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Networkworld: Two-hundred people will run General Electric from the company's new headquarters in the Fort Point part of the city and another 600 will work in its labs. According to Immelt's vision, the headquarters will be open for interacting with startups and academia in which GE is both convener and catalyst. In an interview with Boston's business and political elite yesterday, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of GE Jeff Immelt said GE moved to Boston for two reasons: to win the Internet of Things and rethink how companies work in this winner-take-all technology and innovation economy. If GE's top management can add the missing ingredient by transferring the know-how for growing businesses to billions of dollars in quarterly revenue, Boston could regain its preeminent position for technology business leadership equal to its reputation for leading-edge research and development.

3 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Boston won't be a tech leader again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Boston won't be a tech leader again. They're not culturally diverse enough to attract top talent and top companies. Silicon Valley is very welcoming to Asians, Hispanics, homosexuals, and any other diverse group you can think of. Boston simply doesn't have that diversity, which is necessary to attract good innovators and the top talent. The culture of east coast firms is also far more on productivity and working hard during the workday than on the playful workdays in places like Silicon Valley. I just don't see how Boston can have a thriving tech sector. They're just not able to compete with Silicon Valley, and GE's move there probably won't be a good decision.

  2. What good has come out of Silicon Valley recently? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I can't think of one good thing to have come out of Silicon Valley within the past decade.

    Most of the "innovation" that happened there has revolved around advertising and making it more invasive.

    Anything that might actually have some value (virtual reality, Internet of Things) ends up being hijacked to, you guessed it, subject people to advertising while invasively collecting data about them.

    And then there are things like Android, which are basically just 1990s-era technology like Linux and Java.

    We've also seen them destroy a lot of formerly-good technology. Look at how Firefox has been ruined, for example. Silicon Valley has also been the hub of shitty modern web design, where what should be simple web pages end up requiring extensive JavaScript frameworks and many MB of unnecessary images, videos, and other resources.

    JavaScript, Go and Rust are good examples of how Silicon Valley hasn't improved programming languages at all. JavaScript is still awful, decades after it was first created. Go is, despite all of the hype, rather mediocre and primitive. Rust is a joke.

    For all of the hype that Silicon Valley gets, and all of the funding that has poured into it, we've seen pretty much nothing of real value created by these folks!

  3. GE - They bring good things to light by Cornwallis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Like taxes. Maybe they'll start paying them!