Economic downturn? Recession? Job losses? Really? Sure, Seattle's housing market finally cooled a bit, but listening to business news this morning you'd be excused for thinking all this talk about a bad economy is a crock of shit, at least here in Seattle.
Amazon, Microsoft Want to Buy, Buy, Buy!
Amazon Cries Uncle
With only one out of every one thousand internet searchers using their A9 search engine, Amazon decided to effectively pull the plug on the service by eliminating the once-highly-touted features that supposedly made A9 worth using. From the AP:
Gates Getting Out Of Microsoft
Bill Gates announced today that he's leaving Microsoft to join Robert Scobleizer at Podtech.net where the two will do a call-in style podcast together to air three times a week. It will also include the two of them riffing on the tech news and prank dialing startups ("Hi, this is Bill Gates, I have a billion I'd like to invest in your...olefactorycasts? Ahahahahahaha! Right! Ahahahahaha!"). The two were said to share a moment of sad silence after they mistakenly pranked their own employer, netpod.tech, during a trial run.
Bill Gates Explorer 7 and Unrelated Labor Unrest
The Bill Gates Show in Vegas is wrapping up but if you want to catch up on all the hot Gates action there's the Gates keynote, the Gates/O'Reilly interview and the Gates blogger lunch. At what point does Gates become a bigger brand than Microsoft itself?
We're Really Very Small And Local And Cute And You Will Believe That Even If It Costs Us $130M
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away Seattlest worked our first ever job. It was at an Italian beef sandwich restaurant and if you don't know what that is we forgive you. A lot of people grew up similarly deprived and, well, healthy. Our paychecks were on the order of $50 a week for slinging said beef sandwiches ("you want that dipped? How about a pizza puff on the side?") which at the time we considered all the money we'd ever need. This was back before Seattlest was an everything-wanter. The advertising budget for this restaurant ran somewhere around double our paycheck and that money bought an ad in the local newspaper which appeared weekly (alongside Seattlest's incisive coverage of local high school athletes, it should be noted).

