e premte dhjetor 16, 2005

Hooray for PGH

Just can't help bringing attention to my old hometown....

Google just announced that it is establishing a research center in Pittsburgh. Not a big center -- just expected to grow to 100 people over a few years -- but anything associated with Google nowadays is big news and gets attention.

I'm sure the announcement is going to raise a lot of eyebrows, just like when Rand McNally named Pittsburgh the most livable city in America back in the mid-1980's. Most people think of Pittsburgh as an old-economy city cloaked in black smog and soot. Well it used to be, but things have changed. It's actually high-tech flavoured now. They don't make steel in Pittsburgh anymore, and at least one of the old mill sites is now an R&D park. The biggest employer is, I think, University of Pittsburgh (called "Pitt" for those in the know) which is big in medical tech, and it's located "just down the street" from Carnegie Mellon University which excels in IT -- which is, of course, the attraction for Google.

Pittsburgh has been for quite some time a town ready to be discovered. Maybe the Google announcement will unveil its attractions. The city regularly ranks highly in most-desirable-cities-to-live surveys due to its great universities and museums (a legacy of the city's early 20th C prosperity), dramatic landscape, recreational opportunities, relatively mild climate, etc. and, most notably, low cost of the living. The last of these is, granted, a somewhat back-handed complement because it largely results from the city also being one of the "most leaveable" cities -- with its population having peaked in the mid-1970's as the old industrial jobs were lost. Low demand for housing has made homes incredibly affordable.

No doubt, it would be over-reaching to call Pittsburgh "the next Silicon Valley" -- or even "the next Austin or Denver or San Diego", but with the Google announcement maybe the city will get a little more of the respect it deserves.