TechValley Links – (Mostly) Big Blue Edition

• Advantage Capital moves its New York office from Manhattan to…Glens Falls? Maybe this will help address this issue.
• Hudson River water starts flowing through 13-mile pipeline from Poughkeepsie to IBM’s Fishkill plant.
• IBMers can take vacation whenever they like. Inevitably, some end up taking little or none. Is greater flexibility worth the trade-off of fewer days? I think so.
• NY gets a “D” on economic growth index. Talk about grade inflation. 😉
• IBM to support Sun‘s Solaris.

IBM Lays Off 300 in mid-Hudson

 

Just days after a local economic development official engaged in a round of happy talk, word comes that 300 IBMers in Dutchess County, mostly at the East Fishkill microelectronics plant, will lose their jobs. (At about 4 percent of the 7,000 local employment base I’ve repeatedly seen cited, it appears to be the biggest round of layoffs by IBM since the mid-90s.)

IBM does indeed make Dutchess the technology hub of the region, but there’s no guarantee things will stay that way. That’s why over-reliance on IBM and other Fortune 500 companies is a flawed strategy. We need more efforts toward making the area hospitable to entrepreneurs and the startups that can be the real job and development engines. Big Blue is a great base to build of off, but it alone can’t be expected to carry the local technology sector, let alone the whole local economy.

TechValley Links

Magic Black Beads

This network of black magnetic beads, smaller than a postage stamp, is one of a number of input-output “memory” units in the new “704” electronic calculator built by International Business Machines.

Photo by Ezra Stoller, via Shorpy.

• Small Tech, Big Paycheck: Albany Nanotech chief’s 667K clams makes him the highest-paid state worker in NY.

Picket set for IBM POK

The always uneasy combination of tech and unions is on display in the comment threat of this Poughkeepsie Journal article  and will likely be tomorrow at the informational picket it reports on as being planned by the Alliance@IBM in response to last week’s layoff announcement.

Pinkslips at Big Blue

IBM is handing out pink slips today at locations including Poughkeepsie, a union group tells the Poughkeepsie Journal. At least one commentors on the paper’s website claims to be an IBMer whose colleagues have gotten 30-day notices today.

Mixed bag from IBM

Q1 numbers are in. They’re positive for IBM, but not enough to avoid at least some staff cuts. No word yet on numbers or where exactly they’ll fall.