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Email pioneer sees Detroit as "enterprise town"

Thursday, November 11, 2010

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Detroit

Talk about reinventing Detroit is now coming from one of the Internet's inventors. Nathaniel Borenstein, an early email pioneer and Michigan resident, talks about how the potential for Michigan's tech rebirth isn't necessarily in the college towns of the Great Lakes State, but its urban prairies in the Motor City.

Excerpt:

Borenstein, for those who don't know, is one of the fathers of modern e-mail (an original designer of MIME, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), and currently chief scientist at Mimecast, an e-mail management software company based in the U.K. But Borenstein lives in northern Michigan, a few hours' drive from Detroit, and he was speaking to me not only as a software pioneer, but as a 16-year resident of the state.

I asked him for his ideas on how to promote high-tech growth in Michigan, and I got that and a whole lot more. He shared his thoughts on the role of big tech companies in reviving Michigan's economy, the future of autoworkers, and an interesting take on history.

Borenstein's main suggestion is to "create an enterprise town" in Detroit, and to include incentives for people coming from outside (underemployed Midwestern technologists), to achieve a critical mass of companies and concentrate talent and opportunities in the city. But why Detroit instead of, say, Ann Arbor?

"Historically, the place is Ann Arbor. Five years ago, I would have said that's the place to concentrate it," he says. "But Detroit has this big empty space emerging, perfect for a tech campus." As he explains it, "Detroit is ground zero for everything going on in Michigan. Around half of the land area around Detroit is vacant. They tore down houses that weren't being used. It's an improvement, and necessary for a city that's lost half its population�The mayor is trying to concentrate the population in big contiguous areas that are vacant. This is a huge opportunity."

Read the rest of the story here.

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