What If Microsoft Had Stayed In Albuquerque?
Two of the richest men in the world have roots here
For centuries, Albuquerque has seen riches come and go, as former empires would come and go from New Mexico.
Mostly, they've gone.
Albuquerque is a conundrum. It sits squarely in the middle of nowhere, so its services reach a far broader area than most cities. The closest city that is bigger than Albuquerque is El Paso, which is four hours away. Denver is about seven, and some change.
The other conundrum? It sits squarely in the middle of nowhere. Though it has gotten to be quite large, it's isolated. I-25 and I-40 are your tickets to the world — just know that it will take a while to get anywhere. Our airport (the "Sunport") can get you to most locales with just one stop.
It's the latter one that I think has shaped our destiny and still hurts us. We are growing, but we have no significant headquarters based here. The strides we've made are in the film industry, with Netflix having a major stake here as well as NBCUniversal. Smaller companies have opened to cater to these industries (part of the "multiplier effect" — see below.)
Facebook has opened a cloud storage facility south of the city, which continues to grow. Amazon has opened a major distribution center on the West Mesa, which many are not fond of. It's a big box that was built on top of the formerly uninterrupted mesa, right in the way of some of our beautiful sunsets.
One of Intel's most prominent facilities is in neighboring Rio Rancho, which was barely even a town when the operation began in 1981. It is now New Mexico's third-largest city.
Anyway, enough harrumphing about the majors. Sandia National Laboratories is based here, and then there's the University of New Mexico, both great resources for brains.
I'm sure you've heard a thing or two about Bill Gates and Microsoft. With a market value of 2.46 trillion, it is the world's largest software company. Apple's value has fallen to a paltry 2.43 trillion. Rounding out the top three is Saudi Arabia's Aramco.
Did you know that Microsoft began in a tiny office in Albuquerque? Gates, along with partner Paul Allen, registered the name Microsoft with the New Mexico Secretary of State in 1976.
Who's the other guy? Oh, that would be the one that built the "2001: A Space Odyssey" box on the West Mesa. Born just twelve years before Bill came to town, Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque.
We could have been Seattle! We had and have the infrastructure and indeed the space for growth. They were already doing fine with Boeing, Nordstrom, and Starbucks. (Well, Boeing's trajectory has been a bit temperamental over the years.) Situated in the extreme northwest part of the U.S., it's far from being centrally located. It's also gray and damp much of the time, whereas Albuquerque has more than 300 days of sunshine a year.
Why did you leave us???
Gates and Allen were here for one reason: The Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System ("MITS") had opened in Albuquerque and introduced the Altair 8800 computer. It was the world's first commercially successful microcomputer, and the dynamic duo wanted in. They'd already created the software; they just needed the vehicle, and MITS was it. Pentec Computer purchased MITS, and by 1979, Microsoft high-tailed it to Bellevue, WA, just over the bridge from Seattle where Gates was born.
Meanwhile, Bezos moved to Houston with his mother and new step-dad four years after being born here, never returning.
When companies hire a new worker, there is a "multiplier" effect from that one job. In "The New Geography of Jobs," author Enrico Moretti describes how the higher-paying jobs create jobs to support that worker, i.e., doctors and dentists, down to Starbucks.
“But far more typical (in Albuquerque’s case) are low end jobs in low value-added services. Albuquerque’s innovation cluster never reached the critical mass needed to sustain a truly competitive high-tech ecosystem.”
Fifteen-dollar an hour jobs at Amazon will not have much of a multiplier effect, mainly when the bulk of that income merely covers the essentials.
Our workforce is not well educated enough to attract large companies of substance. However, since the jobs don't require more than a high school education, many companies have call centers here. For instance, Wells Fargo Bank, Fidelity, Safelite, Lowe's, and T-Mobile all have sizeable call centers in the area.
Success breeds success. It's no longer a slam dunk, but more college degrees will generally help an economy run. However, with New Mexico being at or near the bottom in their K-12 education program, we have a lot of work to do.
So no fairy tale ending, but maybe not being one of the top cities in the country with all of their inherent problems is not such a bad place to be.
Not to say that we don't have our problems!
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