When I moved from Philadelphia to the New York metropolitan area a few years ago, the thing that stood out to me the most was the cost of property. A home in NY is often more than double the price of a similar home in other parts of the country (even thought salaries are no where near doubled). This, along with traffic congestion and crowds is the result of one lone factor - population density. Population density gets high when you get millions of people who think that they have to all live in the same place to work and conduct business. That may have been true 50 years ago, but now there just isn't any reason for it.

Recently, we learned that high gas prices force people to consider alternate fuels. The first barrier was apparently $4.00 a gallon. I wonder when the cost of real estate and the general cost of living will get to the point where business people realize that building their data center in Iowa is much more cost effective than other locations (even when you factor in building infrastructure)? Frankly, I don't know how any company built in the costly areas of coastal California or metropolitan New York can compete with companies built in cheaper areas any more...