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Comment by phaedryx | Hacker News Reader

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

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<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.

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.

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