Leaving the nest.

• Author: G.D. Gearino
• Position: FINEPRINT

If you ever had cause to visit the Durham headquarters of Motricity Inc., the software company that found itself with a pile of investor cash last year, you surely marveled at the place. In the renovated American Tobacco complex, within foul-ball distance of Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the headquarters would be the envy of any working stiff who labors in a soulless office building under fluorescent light oozing from an acoustic-tile ceiling. Exposed brick walls? Check. Mammoth wood beams? Check. Stylish furniture? Check. Employee lounge that looks suspiciously like a pub? Check. Nightlife, festivals, restaurants and sporting events fewer than 100 paces away? Check.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Let's make it official: Motricity's headquarters is as good as it gets for corporate life. Better yet, North Carolina (and the Triangle specifically) is one of the more nurturing locales for ambitious tech firms, providing an educated work force and political leaders so accommodating that a weekly wash-and-wax of the CEO's car by the governor isn't wildly- out of reach as an incentive. What company would ever leave such a paradise?

Uh, Motricity. It'll be gone by the end of the year.

Simply put, Motricity--formed in 2004 by the merger of Durham-based Pinpoint Networks and Nashville, Tenn.'s Power by Hand--traded up. When it spent $135 million of that investor money to buy a division of InfoSpace, it decided that Bellevue, Wash.--the Seattle "boomburb" where InfoSpace is--would be an upgrade from Durham. Probably the most significant tech corridor outside Silicon Valley, it's teeming with software programmers and engineers. But Motric ity's move still has the flavor of a sophomore social climber leaping at the chance to sit at the seniors' table in the high-school lunchroom. When you realize that analogy makes Durham--and by extension, all of North Carolina--the table where the braces-wearing, acne-plagued doofuses gather ... well, it stings.

This is the point at which I could be expected to clamber atop my soapbox and inveigh against the foolishness of passing out incentives willy-nilly to bribe companies either to move to North Carolina or stay here. (After all, Motricity is leaving because it feels Bellevue is a better place to do business, not because it's being lured away.) Instead, I'll pose a question: How much loyalty should a company feel to the place of its birth, and how much should we residents feel to that company?

What we owe our companies is...