I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, a.k.a. “The Motor City.” I think it’s safe to say that Detroit hasn’t topped the list of “hot” or “cool” or “best” cities for a while.

But such wasn’t always the case. My parents could remember the Detroit of the 50’s and 60’s. A time when Motown was taking off and America’s love affair with the automobile was in full swing. People anticipated the newest Corvette and Mustang, and lusted after the power and style of the 442.

What’s my point? Well, now that I’m in Seattle — a place many would call “The Software City” — I can see a lot of similarities with Detroit. Here’s why…

We’ve been in an era for the past decade when companies will put operating system logos on world landmarks, and people will line-up for days for the latest must-have software or gadget. When software from my Startup 1.0 company ran e-commerce for AMD, the click and conversion reporting showed that plenty of people were tweaking and upgrading their processors the way some people fiddle under the hood of a car. Heck, an ex-employee of my Startup 1.0 company even invented GreaseMonkey, a wildly popular Netscape plug-in that makes the connection between computer and car tweakers obvious.

GM’s current brand problems came from increasingly crappy cars — the kind where the rearview mirror would fall off because the bean counters in operations had saved ten cents a car by using cheaper adhesive. The GM brand really took a hit when the loyal “Buy American” crowd (you know, the guys who used to key Honda Accords in Detroit parking lots) realized that GM, Ford and Chrysler had every intention of replacing welders with robots and moving other factory jobs to Mexico under NAFTA.

The “Buy American” push did help the Big Three postpone admission of their own problems, though. Until just a few years ago, Hertz and Avis would guarantee that a car of any quality from Detroit would sell well because they absolutely wouldn’t run the risk of fillings their rental stalls with foreign product.

Now that I’m living just west of Redmond, I can see some parallels to Microsoft. Ten years ago, who would have thought a Yahoo! would rather destroy their own market value than become a part of MSFT?

Microsoft has some marginally bad product of its own lately in the form of of Vista, the most reviled OS upgrade since Windows ME. No developer today kids themselves that they can build a stable career as a code-slinger at Microsoft (or Amazon or anywhere else for that matter.) Tech companies have embraced globalization more quickly and with more zest than any other business sector that comes to mind.

But bad though Vista has been according to consumers, millions of copies have been pre-installed by almost every major hardware OEM. Revenue-wise, Vista has gotten the job done for Microsoft.

The good news for Seattle, I think, is that some good things seem to be cooking at Microsoft. They’ve opened-up a bit as a nod to the open source trend sweeping the software industry. Bill Gates has admitted that Vista wasn’t their best work and Microsoft has promised a new “Windows 7″ by 2010.

Rumor has it that this next release will take a page from Apple and the spectacular run they’ve been on lately. Apple certainly isn’t an “open” company — their approach has been a tight control of user experience from a CEO who may or may not be evil, but who is certainly a genius.

A mostly right-brained genius, I would add. Maybe it’s creativity that will define the future leaders in business as some have been suggesting. If so, Seattle certainly has a tremendous local supply of talent.