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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Software giant Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) is postponing plans to construct a $500 million data center in West Des Moines, Iowa, citing falling demand for personal computers as its reason, according to reports by The Associated Press.
Jeff Pomerantz, West Des Moines City manager, received a call from Microsoft on Friday morning informing him that plans for the data center been postponed.
The facility, which is expected to create 75 jobs, was supposed to begin construction this spring or summer.
Microsoft announced Thursday that it would cut 5,000 jobs -- the first time layoffs ever in its 34-year history.
The company reported its fiscal second-quarter earnings early on Thursday, announcing an 11 percent drop in profits.
The Iowa Transportation Committee has also approved a $3.4 million grant to help fund costs of road improvements at the West Des Moines site.
In September, the company opened a $550 million, 470,000-square-foot data center in San Antonio, which provides the company's web-based applications hosting backbone.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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Comment by Anonymous on Monday, December 14, 2009
City Manager Jeff Pomeranz worked tirelessly to make the project happen and it would have brought a lot of jobs to the area during the down economy. It's unfortunate the project did not go through but West Des Moines and the entire metro area seems to be holding up increadibly given the economic times.