Microsoft president’s vision for Pacific Northwest: ‘Tomorrowland’ everywhere

Brad Smith is an unusual futurist. Before he rose to become Microsoft’s president and vice chair, Smith built his reputation as a highly capable attorney with a conciliatory nature.

Much as his counterpart CEO Satya Nadella would later be tapped to reinvigorate the company, Smith was selected in 2002 to pull Microsoft out of its ruthless era.

Speaking with The Seattle Times in March, the affable Smith says his primary strategy was to make nice with everyone. After decades of stepping on competitors and regulatory agencies to reach the top, Microsoft had plenty of parties to placate.

It’s not just Microsoft’s image Smith has wanted to rehabilitate. The company had changed its hometown just by going about its normal business. Once he got the top job, Smith was determined to remake Washington state and the Northwest.

If Microsoft could transform the Puget Sound region over 50 years, why can’t it do the same for Cascadia?

It’s a question Smith’s futurism has led him to. Smith, who refers to Microsoft as “Tomorrowland,” is a key figure for the Cascadia Innovation Corridor and was a member of the steering committee.

The Innovation Corridor is an initiative to grow the economy of Cascadia, a mega region that stretches from north of Vancouver, British Columbia, through Washington to southern Oregon.

Co-chairs of the initiative include former Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire and Laura Jones, CEO of the Business Council of British Columbia. The committee behind it is filled with public officials, academics and representatives for pro-business councils.

Smith pours his time into the initiative, attending annual conferences and using Microsoft’s money to sponsor events and fund research for projects like high-speed trains to connect Cascadia’s cities.

Microsoft, which had an office in Vancouver, British Columbia, was expanding in the city in 2016. In talks with the British Columbia leaders, Smith discovered an opportunity to connect Vancouver and Seattle in a way that hadn’t been done despite their proximity.

“What struck me was that Vancouver and Seattle were two similar places that were not working with each other very much,” Smith says.

Smith and his team scanned through LinkedIn data and were disheartened to find that folks in Northwest cities were interacting with the East Coast more frequently than with each other.

“This doesn’t make sense; we don’t spend time with each other,” he says. “So let’s build a corridor. Then the people in Portland came and knocked on our door and said they want to be a part of it too.”

Smith’s goals are ambitious. In 2019, the initiative laid out a vision of a region humming along with abundant affordable housing, collaborative scientific research between the three cities and high-speed rail by 2035.

Goals around infrastructure are the biggest challenges. Under the Biden administration, the federal government kicked in some funds for the planning stage of high-speed rail in Washington.

The Washington State Department of Transportation partners were awarded a $49.7 million grant last year from the Federal Railroad Administration to advance work on the Cascadia High-Speed Rail program. But it was less than the $198 million they were seeking in 2023; if they have to get more funds, it will be under President Donald Trump, who has shown no appetite for trains.

Connectivity by rail plays into the region’s affordable housing issues, another focus for the initiative and Microsoft. The company has an affordable housing fund into which it’s poured more than $750 million to create or preserve more than 9,200 housing units in the Puget Sound region.

It’s not completely benevolent on the side of Microsoft or other companies that have created similar funds. Smith and company believe projections that show the region’s population will rise, fueled by tech jobs. Plainly, those workers need places to live.

Smith’s crusade for a connected region is due in part to his devotion to the tech industry. He rattles off stats. Of all workers in Washington, 9.4% are tech employees, a higher percentage than in any other state. More than 22% of the state’s economic output comes directly from the high-paying jobs in the tech sector.

Despite its immense growth over the past 50 years, Smith anchors his legislative and community engagement missions in the idea that Seattle’s tech sector will continue to grow.

“If you talk to anybody who works in Olympia or in the business community in Seattle, they’ve heard umpteen times that we’re the most trade-dependent state in the country,” he says. “I bet they’ve never heard that we’re also the most tech-intensive state.”

Washington’s tech economy includes Amazon and Microsoft, two of the largest employers in the world, but there are more than 3,000 startups in the state as well. About a third were started by Microsoft alumni, according to Smith.

Greater Vancouver Board of Trade CEO Bridgitte Anderson says Microsoft’s impact in Vancouver is similar to the early days in the Puget Sound region. The company has about 750 employees in Vancouver, and the tech industry in the city is still growing.

Amazon has a big presence in the city as well, with a main office in an old Canadian postal service building. The city’s tech sector employs more than 125,000 people now, according to Anderson.

Since 2017, tech jobs have grown more rapidly in the Vancouver area than in any large North American city, according to a report from commercial brokerage CBRE.

“Microsoft had a big role in doing that by building up the talent within this region,” Anderson says.

High-paying tech jobs in West Coast cities have fueled affordability issues, which have in turn made tech companies the target of new tax proposals. Seattle and Amazon have brawled over tax policies that targeted the tech giant and similar companies, back-and-forths that ultimately ended in a payroll tax in the city.

Proposals for similar tax policies are bubbling up at the state level. Smith is vehemently against any new taxes.

“I think we’ve got a reasonable tax policy; let’s make sure we don’t mess it up,” Smith says. “Let’s make sure we don’t start applying something like a payroll tax to jobs in this state, because that would make jobs more expensive to keep in the state. Let’s avoid a wealth tax that would discourage founders from starting their companies here.”

Washington has for decades had one of the most regressive tax structures in the nation. The state, with a constitution that doesn’t allow an income tax, has a 6.5% sales tax on top of local rates that push sales taxes in cities like Seattle to more than 10%.

“Our nearly century-old tax code relies mostly on flat taxes that fail to distinguish between small businesses and large corporations, homeowners and skyscraper owners, working people and billionaires,” said Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, in a March 20 statement defending the 2025 revenue proposal from Washington state Democrats. “It’s antiquated, unfit for a modern economy, and deeply unfair.”

Smith argues higher taxes on businesses undermine what he sees as the foundation of the state’s prosperity: the tech industry.

Both Microsoft and Amazon have benefited from tax breaks in the state. Microsoft’s data centers in Central Washington have received tax credits and Amazon received some while developing its Seattle headquarters.

Smith has championed Microsoft’s public-private partnerships. He established the company’s philanthropic division in 2015 and points to the education initiatives the company funds in Washington state to fill the tech worker pipeline. (The Seattle Times has received financial support from Microsoft Philanthropies.)

The company’s education program, which began in the 1990s, has expanded its goal from promoting basic digital literacy to introducing artificial intelligence training into schools.

But there’s a push-and-pull with the business side that Smith acknowledges. Amazon ultimately got its wish with the head tax but stopped development in Seattle anyway. Microsoft spent decades in business-friendly Bellevue but pulled out of its offices there.

“I don’t think it’s realistic to expect any private-sector enterprise to be in a position to ignore economics,” he says. “But it’s also more than right for people to ask businesses to manage economics with a community-minded spirit.”

Before he became Microsoft’s top lawyer, Smith had been on the company’s legal team for nine years, during the most tumultuous time for the company, as it faced probes from the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice and ultimately an antitrust lawsuit from the latter.

The dust mostly settled in 2002. The DOJ had tried to break up the company, but the two parties ultimately announced a settlement.

In the wake of that, Smith interviewed for the role of general counsel. In front of Microsoft founder and then-chairman Bill Gates, then-CEO Steve Ballmer and four other top executives, he presented a one-slide PowerPoint that said it was time for peace.

“I wanted to find a way to make peace with the government and rebuild our relationship with the rest of the industry, and I was very up front,” Smith says. “If you want to do this, then I’m sort of your guy or at least a good candidate. And if that’s not what you want to do, then I’m probably the wrong person.”

By getting the job, he had the support to act fast and reshape the company’s public image.

Smith’s promotion almost coincides with Boeing, then Washington’s largest employer, moving its headquarters to Chicago in 2001. There was an opening for Microsoft, which hadn’t interacted much with local officials and the broader business community, to step up and become a community leader.

“We did get more engaged. I feel that we built a collaborative culture between the business community and the people who govern the state in Olympia,” Smith says.

A decade later, the tech sector in Washington was booming. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos chose the Seattle area for his empire, due partly to the talent pool. Silicon Valley companies followed, establishing satellite offices and eventually engineering hubs in the Pacific Northwest.

A region grounded in aerospace and timber had transformed into a region building the digital future.

“Since 1975, the population of the state has more than doubled and the economy has roughly tripled,” Smith says. “We went from being the 14th largest economy in the United States to the ninth. It’s almost entirely because of one thing: the growth of an industry that did not exist 50 years ago.”

2025 The Seattle Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.