One popular tourist attraction in Colorado Springs is the Garden of the Gods Park, where stark red sandstone formations seem half-scattered, half-planned, combining elements of Stonehenge and a Valhalla that Norse gods had rapidly departed. An eerie drive to the park along Garden of the Gods Road passes monoliths of a different sort--buildings owned by electronics companies, testament to the 1990s, though few people walk their corridors now.

Intel Corp.'s decision last week to abandon its local fab in the corridor was hardly the first sign of Colorado Springs' emptying out. As the recession began in 2001, the Agilent Technologies and Hewlett-Packard segments of the splintered HP went from bustling to barren. Buildings remained, but cars were few, and weeds grew in parking lots where lines of SUVs once fought for space. Even after Agilent and HP returned to profitability in mid-decade, these buildings never looked full again. Telecommuters, globally distributed work teams and "rationalization" helped to make the real estate too big for the people inside.

At the road's end, a sprawling telecom software campus is quiet as Versailles after the revolution. As ownership changed from MCI to WorldCom to Verizon Communications, the campus thrived. But today it seems a mere footnote to FiOS, and local traffic bears that out.

This story plays out again and again. If this were the 1990s, LSI Logic's acquisitions of Symbios/NCR and Agere would have meant sprawling operations around Colorado. Instead, LSI today has small design and sales offices in Colorado Springs, Longmont and Fort Collins. Operations of Vitesse Semiconductor similarly are dwindling, and local officials look with trepidation at the Atmel Corp. fab on the South Side.

It's obvious that most electronics manufacturing inevitably will move to Asia and other offshore locations. And in the past decade, U.S. unemployment has not skyrocketed, as many feared. Nevertheless, the long row of near-empty man-made monoliths on Garden of the Gods Road makes one wonder: How many U.S. citizens can a knowledge-worker service industry really employ? And what happens to everyone else?