Google has Minnesota in its future -- or certainly should. So says my neighbor Ed Kohler, who blogs at TechnologyEvangelist.com. (He's literally just a couple miles from my place in Bloomington, MN.) He just put up a spectacular pitch for why Google should buy the soon-to-close Ford plant property in St. Paul for a data center site. Ed, you are the man! Talk about a compelling case. Wow, would this ever put Minnesota back on the map as a major computing center. [It really was once. Seriously.]
The University of Minnesota even brought the "Gopher" search and retrieval protocol to the Internet in 1991. How many of you remember that? I'll bet Larry, Sergey, and Eric do...
Other states are, of course, all over Google to locate facilities inside their borders. But we can surely make a better case than North Carolina, with all the recent flap going on there regarding the outrageous tax incentives secretly offered to Google. We wouldn't need to bribe them -- we actually have something they could really, really want.
Last year, Larry Page threw a bone to Ann Arbor, Michigan -- where he went to undergraduate school -- by opening an ad sales office there. I learned about that when I discovered the Ann Arbor SPARK blog suddenly started running me as a "guest blog" one day last year. [Thanks, guys. Never even been there, but happy to help!] Landing that Google office was a coup -- well, a morale booster, anyway -- for a state that's in dire need to create jobs to get their economy back on track. But it's small potatoes compared to what a data center on this jewel of a property on the Mississippi could mean in economic terms, for both Google and Minnesota.
This piece of land is literally a one of a kind. Ford's been there 83 years! Henry himself purportedly chose the place. I mean, Google -- your own hydroelectric dam??? The possibilities for this property, to so many varied interests, are mind boggling. One of those eventual outcomes, of course, would be more high-rise condos. But who the hell wants those? The neighboring residents of Highland Park surely don't! The battles between forces opposing potential developers for that property are just starting to heat up. And, unfortunately, that could drag on for years. How nice it would be for a big monster player like Google to come in and shorten that process considerably... :-)
Why, as Ed so eloquently argues, shouldn't Google take a serious look at the state that brought us such Internet legends as Gopher and the Allaire brothers? [In fact, I'm gonna ping my friends Jeremy and JJ right now and send them this link, so they can weigh in on this, too!]
So, the gauntlet has been tossed. Are you listening, Governor Pawlenty? ...and whoever else is actually taking leadership in this state for real economic development. Ed's laid out the case for the "Minne-GOOG" data center. Now let's see if our guys have the cajones to pick up the ball and take a run at selling it to Larry, Sergey, and Eric....
Go, Gopher(s)!
