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66 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER 2017 EMA PETER/ MICROSOFT F aced with a space crunch in 2009, tour guide Allison Flicker explains, founder and CEO Je' Bezos and his team explored the option of relocating to the suburbs where Amazon might build its own cam- pus in the fashion of its information tech- nolo"y peers like Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. But they decided to stay and grow in the central business district. The feedback from employees was that they overwhelmingly preferred to work downtown. It was easy to get to, especially for the 55 per cent of sta' who didn't drive to work. And it just had a better atmosphere, tied into a neighbourhood with a variety of restaurants and other amenities instead of sequestered in suburban isolation. Today Amazon is by far the largest private-sector employer in Seattle. The company issues maps to employees to help them •nd their way to its vari- ous buildings. Thanks to its policy allowing sta' to bring their dogs to work—more than 2,000 dogs are registered—canine grooming salons dot the neigh- bourhood. And though this is downtown, spotting someone wearing a tie on the street or in an elevator is a rare occurrence. Amazon is by no means the only technolo"y player transforming the downtown of a major city. In San Francisco, Salesforce.com will move into an eponymous 61-storey tower, the tallest in the city, in the spring of 2018. LinkedIn Corp. recently relo- cated its head ožce from Mountain View, Califor- nia, to another new skyscraper by the Bay. Uber Technologies Inc. is also building a San Francisco headquarters, this one a midrise, but still 420,000 square feet. Zappos.com is almost single-handedly trying to revive the dowdy downtown of Las Vegas. The tech takeover has been observed beyond North America, too, in cities including London and Berlin. It's even happening in China. Tencent Holdings Ltd., which developed the world's premier messaging app, WeChat, is building side-by-side towers connected by walkways that will provide workspace for 12,000 employees in Shenzhen, just inland from Hong Kong. Perhaps not surprisingly, the complex is designed by the same architecture •rm responsible for Amazon's Spheres. The phenomenon is also happening in Vancouver, subtly changing the character of the city's downtown in the process. Last year Microsoft Corp. took over two ¥oors of the Nordstrom block anchoring the Paci•c Centre mall. Where shoppers once browsed the aisles of Eaton's (then Sears's) B.C. ¥agship, today coders sip lattes and nibble healthy snacks between sessions working on OneNote, MSN and Skype for Business. Another 3.5-acre ¥oor of the same building is occupied by animation and dig- ital e'ects house Sony Imageworks. And with 1,300 sta' •lling a former fashion warehouse in nearby Yaletown, SAP is among the largest employers on the downtown peninsula, period. Information technolo"y and digital media com- panies accounted for 36.7 per cent of the demand for ožce space in downtown Vancouver in the sec- ond quarter of this year, according to leasing com- pany Colliers International (down from 42 per cent a year earlier). They already occupy 21.8 per cent of downtown ožce space, putting tech in league with •nance and professional services as an occupant of space. That's up from virtually nothing 20 years ago. Breaking out of the burbs The dot-com boom of the late 1990s was largely a suburban business-park phenomenon. Its nodes included Redmond, Washington (home of Microsoft), Burnaby (where Electronic Arts Inc.'s largest video-game studio has its own soccer pitch) and, for that matter, all of Silicon Valley. Many of these leafy redoubts remain tech hot- beds, but the industry's recent expansion has almost all been in the centre of the city. Twitter Inc. set a Bay Area trend in 2012 when, upon going public, instead of decamping to the Valley as expected, it doubled down on San Francisco's central business district. It took advantage of city incentives to spruce The things millen- nial employees appreciate: good transit access, city amenities and, within the space, an open, collaborative environment where they're not chained to a desk — Edoardo De Martin, Microsoft Canada

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