← Analysis Walkabout — wander by real connection, not category
IBM Anchored Research Triangle Park for 60 Years. It's Packing Up the Same Year the Region Pulled In $10.8 Billion.
Research Triangle Park opened in 1959 as a deliberate state bet on three nearby universities. IBM anchored it for sixty years as its largest employer -- and is now consolidating its workforce down to roughly 8,000, the same year North Carolina pulled in $10.8 billion in life-sciences investment instead.
Read this piece →
Where this connects
Silicon Valley's Largest Employer for Decades Wasn't a Tech Company. It Was a Missile Plant.
The garage-startup story leaves out the tenant that mattered most: by 1959, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company employed nearly 20,000 pe...
Boston Got There First. Then It Lost the Lead to Silicon Valley on Purpose.
Route 128, completed in 1956, was the nation's first real high-tech corridor -- built on defense money five years before Silicon Valley. ...
Silicon Valley's First Hard Drive Was Built by a Company Born in Upstate New York
IBM's San Jose lab shipped the first commercial hard disk drive in 1956, from a plant built for wartime manufacturing. Seventy years late...
North Carolina's Grid Grew by 10 Terawatt-Hours in Fifteen Years. Duke Energy's Own Plan Has It Growing by 80 in the Next Fifteen.
Electricity demand across Duke Energy's Carolinas system grew by 10 terawatt-hours over the past 15 years. Duke's own resource plan proje...
Two-Thirds of the Fortune 500 Are Legally Delaware Companies. Almost None of Them Are Actually There.
Two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are legally incorporated in Delaware without being headquartered there -- a legal address worth nearly a th...
In 1994, 48 Companies Kept an Office Near Walmart's Headquarters. By 2001 It Was 445. Today It's Over 1,500.
A large enough anchor employer pulls a second economy into its orbit. Bentonville tracked it year over year: 48 companies kept a Walmart-...
Techstars Moved Its Headquarters Out of Boulder in 2024. Boulder Raised $1.7 Billion in Venture Capital the Same Year Anyway.
Techstars, the accelerator that put Boulder on the startup map, moved its headquarters to New York and shut down its Boulder programs in ...
IBM Just Showed Off a Chip That Runs Two Instruction Sets at Once. The Company Is 115 Years Old. Most Companies That Old Are Dead.
IBM's new dual-ISA mainframe chip is the same trick it's pulled for 115 years. Sears is the same age and it's dead. The difference isn't ...
Start a new walkabout