Wednesday's analysis about whether the local tech community would get any support in Mike Bloomberg's New York mayoral administration rustled up a flurry of feedback. Readers from both ends of the political spectrum wrote in to say they thought Silicon Alley was short-sighted in throwing support to a Democratic candidate who had paid little more than "lip service" to its needs.

One sampling of a response came from Tom Lipscomb, Chairman of the Center for the Digital Future:

Loved your piece in today's AtNewYork.com in which Silicon Alley figureheads seem to have paused weeping in their beer just long enough to wonder whether Bloomberg might be a blessing in disguise.

One wonders what it will take to bring NYC's digital entrepreneurs to their senses. Certainly the catastrophe of April 2000 should have. But now with 9/11 the City of New York is facing another 100,000 lost jobs and the disappearance of its $1.5 billion surplus into an estimated $2.5 billion plus annual deficit for the next few years, the dark days of Big Mac in the mid 1970s are likely to look like a golden age.

Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future is on the right track. The key to any turnaround will be a substantial change in New York City and New York State indifference to the extraordinarily hostile environment they have created for businesses in all sectors. With the highest taxes and highest capital gains taxes in the nation, just for starters, no one with an alternative would locate a new business in New York City unless they had to.

And they don't have to anymore. They don't have to overpay their employees to make up for outrageous costs of living and a school system that wastes money in direct proportion to its shortchanging of the most disadvantaged NYers of any possibility of gainful employment. And there are far more economically attractive alternatives in both CT and NJ that are convenient to the cultural advantages of New York without being caught in this black hole.

I should know. I've started two new technology companies in New York in the past 12 years, taken them both public (they still exist happily on NASDAQ...thank God -- and their management) and they are both substantially out of here. I have started another one and it will be out of here even faster.

Sure "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere..." but why not make it where you can keep some of it? New York used to be a proud corporate headquarters. Now it's just an incubator.

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It's not like the GOP has any more of a clue than the Democrats. Guiliani and Pataki have done abysmally in economic development for both the state and city in boom times and had their doors blown off by competition from neighboring states who only pray this idiocy will continue under any new management. How many of the 13.5 million tours to the Potemkin highrise at 55 Broad Street run by Charlie the Garg and Charlie the Duck have paid off?

Even free market think tanks like the Manhattan Institute have elected to ignore the opportunities for economic development missed during the seven years of fat we have just enjoyed rather than criticize their pet candidates like Guiliani.

It's about profit, stupid. And it is hard enough to make without fighting a corporate domicile tooth and nail. Silicon Alley seems to have fallen for the "special benefit" dole approach to the general plight, instead of fighting for special incentives that will mitigate the hostile economic environment they endure by increasing their opportunity for investment, growth and profitability.

A quick look at the economic development section on Bloomberg's Website gives some nice glimmers of hope. But former journalist and now philanthropies man Tom Watson is right to want to hold Bloomberg to his announced "promise to work with business." But work towards WHAT? There are still no signs that Silicon Alley has any better idea what economic development IS than the politicians we need to enlist in it.

* Thomas H. Lipscomb is chairman of The Center for the Digital Future.