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Looking through corporate newsrooms or Site Selection’s archives can yield useful historical reminders. Sometimes the two converge. In the same week Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates pledged to give away around $200 billion of his fortune over the next 20 years, Site Selection Editor in Chief Adam Bruns was looking through Microsoft’s press materials from its 50th anniversary celebration this year. There in the corporate timeline was a photo of a solitary office building in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the company was headquartered from 1976 to 1978 before relocating to Washington State, followed by a 1978 photo of the company’s founding employees.
That stoked a memory from Site Selection Executive Vice President Ron Starner, who summoned the cover story from Site Selection’s May 2001 issue, “Intel Outside.” The story he reported from a visit to Albuquerque documented Intel’s May 2000 pledge to invest $2 billion in an expansion of its Rio Rancho site in the Albuquerque area.
“To New Mexico’s state government leaders, Intel is one prized catch they don’t want to lose,” Starner wrote then. “ ‘People forget that Bill Gates first incorporated in New Mexico, but there was not a warm reception for him here,’ says John Garcia, secretary for the New Mexico Economic Development Dept. ‘Polaroid also started here and left. The political dynamic in New Mexico had been a horrible situation for years. Our whole approach now is to commercialize innovation. Somebody’s idea is going into a product.’ ”
“In short,” Starner wrote in the story’s conclusion, “New Mexico is doing everything it can to keep Intel happy, even as Intel tries to make sure its own growth doesn’t overwhelm New Mexico. As the state’s Garcia said, ‘We learned a lesson by losing Bill Gates.’ ”
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