Wanted: People who are smart enough to work in tech AND smart enough to actually get facts before making stupid public statements.

Seriously, few people actually live in Detroit City and that isn't where most of the jobs are - most live outside and it's perfectly safe most places. I'm pretty sure there are neighborhoods in San Francisco and Boston and Austin that the tech workers avoid. No different in Detroit.

You mean like how the rest of the country elected George Bush twice?

Given that Ford earned $7.2 Billion in net income in 2013 and GM made a $3.8 billion profit over the same period I think GM and Ford will be very surprised to hear that they cannot make cars in the US profitably since most of their profit comes from US operations.

You don't need to expand factories to make the efficient. Inefficient factories get shut down and those that remain are doing just fine. I have visited numerous Ford and GM assembly plants (as well as Toyota and Honda) and for the most part they are as efficient and profitable as those of their leading competitors.

Wouldn't have happened because the supply chain would have imploded. GM gets liquidated and it would have dragged Ford and Chrysler down with it because they all share the same suppliers. Even the CEO of Toyota publicly admitted that liquidating GM would have been a bad idea because it would have hurt them badly too. GM being liquidated puts Delphi and Lear and a bunch of other Tier 1, 2 and 3 companies out of business. My company would have folded and not come back.

When a company the size of GM + its supply chain goes under, the jobs go away too and aren't easily replaced. There are a lot of very talented people who had a hard time finding work after 2008. Some still do.

Pretty clueless comment there. You can easily work your whole career in Metro Detroit without having to deal with a union even once. Most workers in the area do not belong to a union of any sort and in fact the state just became a right-to-work state (for better or worse).

So what? 80% of the population of Detroit Metro lives outside the City. Most of Detroit Metro is actually quite safe, similar to any other large metropolitan region. Very few people live in the City and most of the near-term economic opportunity and jobs is not in the City either. I've lived near Detroit and very rarely had any reason to visit the City itself. If I dropped you off in nearby city like Birmingham you'll find it to be as nice a place as just about anywhere in San Francisco and VERY safe.

It most assuredly is not a marketing ploy. There is a HUGE number of technology jobs in and around Detroit Metro and always has been because guess what? There is a LOT of technology that goes into manufacturing cars. Robotics, computers, automation, coatings, materials science, welding, forming, stamping, chemicals, etc. As the auto industry has bounced back from 2008-2009, job growth has rebounded too. It's actually not surprising at all that Detroit's job growth is rather high at the moment.

Only morons who have never actually come to Michigan think that. Look, 80% of Detroit Metro is outside the City. Oakland Country which is immediately to the north of Detroit is one to the ten wealthiest counties in the US, has a AAA credit rating and is a genuinely nice place to live. Ann Arbor (20 miles west) is one if the nicest college towns you could ever want to visit and has some really cool business activity going on.

Detroit CITY is in the midst of such issues. Detroit METRO is largely unaffected. Oakland County immediately to the north of Detroit City is one of the ten wealthiest counties in the US and has a AAA credit rating. Guess where 80% of the population of Metro Detroit lives? (hint - it isn't in Detroit City)

Because most people who live NEAR Detroit City don't live IN Detroit City and haven't for a long time. Metro Detroit is actually a very nice place to live and Michigan is absolutely beautiful. I know because I've lived there.

If you think that then you really know nothing about it and clearly haven't visited the area. Yes there are some parts of Detroit City that are pretty crappy. That doesn't describe much of the rest of Michigan.

Automation Alley is not a marketing company. They are a sort of tech transfer organization/incubator that helps Michigan businesses grow. It's actually a pretty neat operation and I've been to events they hold. The studies they cite are actually well researched and factual. There are a HUGE number of tech jobs in Michigan and Metro Detroit has more engineers per square mile than all but a handful of cities in the US. There is an enormous amount of technology that goes into manufacturing and about 50 of the largest manufacturing companies plus their supply chains are headquartered in Michigan, most fairly close to Detroit.

I've lived both places within the last 10 years plus I got my education at WashU. St Louis is decidedly NOT the "tech hub of the midwest". Plenty going on there and some pretty good talent and a nice place to live but there is WAY more tech going on near Detroit than in St Louis except for a few areas. If there is a "tech hub of the midwest" it is either Chicago or Detroit depending on how you want to measure it.

Not hard to grow fast when you don't have all that many to begin with. Plus a lot of the tech jobs in Missouri are in Kansas City.

It's not just growth. Detroit has had lots of tech jobs for decades. It's been in the top 5 markets for many types of tech jobs for a long time. There is an ENORMOUS amount of technology that goes into automobile manufacturing. Robotics, CAD, industrial automation, materials science, welding, forming, coatings, chemicals, software and more. There are very few places in the USA with a higher density of engineering talent and opportunity.

Oh and before someone makes yet another ill informed remark about Detroit City, don't confuse Metro Detroit with Detroit City. Oakland County, immediately to the north of Detroit is one of the 10 wealthiest counties in the entire USA and has a AAA credit rating. Michigan is actually a really nice place to live, especially if you love the outdoors. Ann Arbor which is close by is a fantastic college town too if that suits your sensibilities.

I'm one of those people who does "serious" spreadsheet work. By and large switching between the Excel and OOo/LO works pretty well. Occasional formatting issues and the odd formula incompatibility but mostly it works fine. I try to use macros as little as possible so I can't speak to compatibility there but I would expect it to be something of a creeping horror.

Sadly yes. Quite a few of them in fact.

I have and it generally works but probably not exactly the way you expect. Base isn't really the same thing as Access. It's more of a connector application than a standalone database product. I use it primarily to do ODBC connections between spreadsheets and a database. Unfortunately they tend to break their ODBC code between versions so I've been stuck on a pretty old version of OO for quite a while.

Bingo. If you have a heavily macro'd set of Excel spreadsheets or the like you probably aren't going to want to switch. Just way too painful. But most people could probably switch with only modest problems here and there.

Sadly that isn't really true. My company has standardized on LibreOffice and we use it for most things. However I get Word and Excel files all the time that cannot be accurately read by OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Particularly .DOCX and .XLSX files. Many are just fine but the more complicated ones tend to have moderate to severe formatting corruption. Sometimes to the point of unreadability. Google Docs and other doc viewers frequently don't do any better of a job of it. I have to keep a seat of Microsoft office available for those documents that I can't read any other way even to this day.

It isn't solved I assure you. EDI is useful but not easy or simple enough to be universally implemented. EDI generally only gets used by rather large organizations and it doesn't fit so well with the sort of spot buys that smaller companies tend to engage in. It tends to require a lot of process change rather than being an adaptation of existing processes. Setup is generally too hard and expensive. Think of it a little like using FTP vs email for file transfer. FTP better designed for the actual transfer of files but it's harder to set up, has more transaction handshake overhead for the user, not as useful for one time transfers, requires more training, and users already have email and know how to use it. Despite the fact that using email is technologically worse in a lot of ways it fits people's workflows a lot better so it gets used. Current EDI implementations suffer from basically the same problem.

That's why some sort of open software here would be a huge blessing. Few companies really want to be tied to some proprietary software if it isn't necessary. I would be delighted to see some EDI equivalent to Apache - an open source solution that works well for most and is relatively easy to put in place. Hell it could be as simple as emailing and receiving documents from some piece of middleware which requires relatively minimal changes by users.

Nothing wrong with that if it gets the job done. I certainly would prefer something that is based on something already well understood and preferably more open. No sense reinventing more wheels than necessary. In fact you would have to at some point implement some way to talk with existing EDI systems because a lot of them are already implemented and they aren't going to get torn out.

To be honest, if Intuit had a brain in their skulls they would implement some form of EDI directly into their software that made document exchange easier and reduced paper shuffling. But they don't seem to be interested. Hell their ODBC drivers were developed by a third party, even the ones they include with their more expensive packages. You would think that would be something they would want to control and use but they don't. Their internal databases appear to be some sort of non-standard home rolled junk.

Yep! Total chicken and egg problem though perhaps not an unsolvable one. You'd basically have to make something that is easy to start and easy to use and falls back gracefully for customers not using it yet. Plug in to popular accounting software packages and maybe a web interchange. Once companies start to use stuff like this they tend to stay with it so the user stickiness would likely be rather high if the experience is good.

Honestly I'd probably start with Quickbooks which has an active SDK as Intuit is actually the bigger player here. More small businesses use quickbooks than anything else. I do know that Sage works with a lot of third party software but I don't work with their products enough to know many details.

Of course they are. However that is not incompatible with a tool for exchanging documents and data more easily. I understand and respect your distaste for some of their business practices. I deal with Quickbooks all the time and some of the restrictions are just absurdly arbitrary. For instance you cannot do any sort of inventory costing except for Average Cost (no LIFO, no FIFO, no Standard Cost unless you buy expensive add ons from third parties). It's not like they don't know about these things either.

I am a Certified Management Accountant (another type of certified accountant somewhat like a CPA but focused on internal corporate accounting rather than public accounting). Short version is that companies care that it works. If you need accountants to review bits of it, that isn't hard to arrange. There are plenty of plug ins to software like Quickbooks (I'm a Quickbooks Proadvisor too) and the majority of small businesses use some form of Quickbooks with most of the remainder using Sage products. Quickbooks would seem to be the logical place to start but you might even be able to do most of the work through some sort of neutral online exchange.

Happy to chat on or off slashdot and share my perspective on things even if it comes to nothing ultimately. I'm quite serious about the problem though I can't promise the solution will be easy. The biggest challenge probably isn't actually writing the software, it's getting multiple parties to use it. Kind of a chicken and egg problem. However kind of like social networking sites if you can get it working and groups using it the network effects will be REALLY strong.