It might have been a holiday week, but it was still a busy one for the Seattle tech scene.
First up: Microsoft finally confirmed a big sales reorganization that will cut thousands of jobs at the company. It’s all a plan to put company resources behind Azure, its cloud platform, and we discuss what it says about where Microsoft is going on this episode of the Week in Geek.
The move is another illustration of how important the cloud has become for tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services is the number one cloud platform in the world.
The incident was all a bit of a PR mess for Microsoft: GeekWire and other outlets ended up reporting on the layoffs three separate times as more information leaked out of the company.
In other news, real estate technology company Redfin filed for its initial public offering, meaning it will likely be the first Pacific Northwest company to go public in 2017. Redfin is looking to raise $100 million in the IPO.
It ends a worrying IPO drought in the first half of the year, giving a good indication that Seattle’s economy is doing well. Three technology and biotech companies from the Seattle area went public last year, although the region saw no IPOs in 2015.
The filing also gave us a chance to glimpse inside some of Redfin’s operations, including the Seattle data center where it hosts its site, its new Redfin Now home buying service, and its entry into the Manhattan real estate market.
Plus, Seattle will soon be seeing more bikes on the road thanks to a bike sharing pilot program that was okayed by the city government Thursday.
While bike shares seem like a good idea — especially for those stuck in South Lake Union traffic — we wonder how well they’ll do in a city where most bikers take the craft very seriously.
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