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Comment by cbdumas | Hacker News Reader

If Amazon hadn't turned this whole "HQ2" thing into a national drama they could have built a huge presence there without riling up so much backlash. Hopefully this ridiculous stunt is a lesson to them.

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Unfortunately, I think they learned that cities will bend over backwards for them and offer up tons of free data and tax incentives.

not the cities they want to move to though...

Pretty widely speculated that they were going to go to NYC and VA regardless of what the other cities did & the HQ2 gambit was just meant to maximize their bargaining position with these governments

Ok, but those people were wrong, since Amazon ended up pulling out of New York. New Yorkers have an extremely inflated sense of self-important and think Amazon just has to be in New York, when that’s clearly not the case.

<speculation> Honestly I think they had only a very few locations in mind when starting this "search" anyway, but wanted to frame it as this big, open-ended, national competition in order to wring the highest dollar amount out of their favorite spots. They were never going to take the risk of attracting workers to Tulsa, Detroit, or {insert other city in Middle America} over an existing large pool of talent in an attractive metropolitan area. </speculation>

While it is conjecture, I think this speculation is accepted relatively widely at this juncture. So given the farcical nature of the HQ2 competition, I think it's all the better that NYC doesn't bend to Amazon and allow them to dictate the terms at which they enter an already competitive labor marketplace.

Smaller cities will, which IMO is a good thing. We need to be spreading the tech ecosystem, not further concentrating it in SF/Seattle/NYC.

Was it amazon, or the national media?

Definitely Amazon. They ran ads about it and made a very public campaign that lasted years. Nobody forced them to run a secret auction for who was willing to give them the most taxpayer dollars. Apple, Google, and Facebook are all setting up big new offices in New York right now, they didn't need billions of dollars in subsidies to do it.

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