Apple is the latest leading-edge tech company to open a Seattle engineering office, joining Google, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, Oracle, LinkedIn, Groupon, eBay, and (just last week) Alibaba.
What’s going on?
First, Seattle is the software capital of the world. That’s literally – numerically – true: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports more “Software Developers” (“Applications” + “Systems”) in Seattle (Seattle-Everett-Bellevue) than in Silicon Valley (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara).
Second, Seattle the cloud capital of the world. That’s also literally true – just look outside. But, seriously, who are the major players in cloud services? Amazon – Seattle. Microsoft – Seattle. Google – 2,000+ engineers, and lots of their cloud activity, Seattle. There are also some leading “cloud technology” companies here, such as F5 Networks and EMC/Isilon, plus some smaller folks such as Skytap. And there are the “big data” analytics and applications companies: Tableau, INRIX, GraphLab, etc.
Go team! Even more of our alums will be able to remain in-state!
Read about it: GeekWire (which broke the story); Seattle Times; VentureBeat; more GeekWire.