From Silicon Valley to Seattle.

here comes a time in your life when you have to give greater importance to your spouse's career¹. Thus it is that I'm blogging from the Seattle area.

After serving Cisco for a little more than 19 years, and starting today, my wife has joined Microsoft Corporation. She is excited to be part of a cloud infrastructure initiative within Microsoft, in Redmond, WA.

How did we decide to leave Silicon Valley for Redmond Country, after having been in the Valley for several decades? The Microsoft opportunity for my wife's career came first, of course.

To begin with, my wife and I are already immigrants to the Valley. And, sooner or later, I want to spend some time away from Silicon Valley anyway, in Bangalore specifically, and I figured moving to Seattle from Silicon Valley is a good first step for an eventual Bangalore sojourn. We'd have to leave the hustle & bustle of the Valley at that juncture.

Why not now?

When you leave a place where you have lived for several decades, you leave behind a lot of family & friends: people who have had varied influence in your life. But, video communication over the Internet continues to make great strides regularly — Microsoft's own product, Skype, is a good example of that — and hopefully will ease the distance communication issues. And, besides, there is now a new destination for our friends & family to escape from their normal abodes.

Children are a slightly different story. When your children are already away from home, sculpting their own future, it seems a bit easier for the parents to make these kinds of decisions. And, besides, in this era of world-as-a-global-village, the children will gravitate to where they find their calling ... just as I gravitated to Silicon Valley from Bangalore.

So, with a combined sense of adventure and acceptance of an eventual time away from Silicon Valley, I send my warm wishes from the Seattle area.

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¹My wife has done her share all these years.