Boeing Co. has successfully completed the critical "power on" testing of the electrical systems of its 787 Dreamliner, the company said Friday.

The tests were completed well before the end-of-the-month deadline Boeing had set for itself in its revised Dreamliner testing and production schedule.

The tests began June 11 and continued until Friday.

The tests set the stage for further expansion of the Dreamliner's operating repertoire culminating in its first flight late this year.

The 787 is about 14 months behind schedule because of difficulties with major and minor suppliers.

One of Alaska Airlines' more nettlesome new competitors, Bay Area-based Virgin America Airlines, is cutting back its flying to cope with the fuel cost crisis.

The Burlingame, Calif.-headquartered start-up airline said recently it will cut its seat availability by about 10 percent. Most of those cuts will come in its mid-week transcontinental flying.

Virgin America's entry into the Seattle-San Francisco and Seattle-Los Angeles market has spurred a competition for market-share with SeaTac's Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, the incumbent airlines on those routes.

Virgin America's cutbacks mirror industry trends: reduce unprofitable flying to reduce losses caused by the huge escalation in fuel costs.

A new study by commercial real estate brokerage CB Richard Ellis shows the Seattle office market is among the most vigorous in the country.

The CBRE study ranked Seattle second only to suburban Miami in the percentage increase in occupancy cost. That cost increase is usually a good measure of the demand for office space in a market.

Worldwide, Seattle ranked 16th. At the top of the list is Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, the former Saigon, with an increase of 94.4 percent.

"The Seattle central business district office market remained a true 'landlord's market,'" the study said. "While institutional investors may finally see some slowdown in activity, strong absorption is enabling current owners to keep lease rates high to validate their 'top dollar' purchases of 2007."

Suburban Seattle ranked ninth in the U.S. with a 17.8 percent increase.

Two years after it won a competition to build a mostly residential building on Tacoma's Thea Foss Waterway, Prium Companies got approval this week for a new design for a smaller building featuring primarily office space.

Blame the downturn in the housing market, said Don Meyer, executive director of the Foss Waterway Development Authority. The authority's board approved the new design Wednesday.

Because of the changes, Prium must reapply to the state Department of Ecology for an amendment to its original shoreline development permit.

Construction on Prium's building, between Albers Mill and the State Route 509 cable-stay bridge, should start next spring, Meyer said.

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Thursday's announcement of 1,200 further job cuts at Seattle-based Washington Mutual Inc. may not be the end of staff reductions at the thrift.

WAMU Chief Executive Officer Kerry Killinger said this week the company continues to review its business with an eye toward eliminating unprofitable operations and streamlining others.

The cuts would reduce the bank's Puget Sound area staff of about 4,600 workers by about 260.

The latest layoffs are the third round of staff reductions at the bank which has suffered because of the subprime lending crisis.

The Tacoma Housing Authority has recently finalized the agreement to purchase the Tacoma Rhodes Center from the state

The deal is to be completed by no later than August 27. The Legislature asked the state's Office of General Administration to offer the building to public organizations first.

The Housing Authority stepped forward and after several rounds of negotiation agreed on a deal. State tenants in the building who want to extend their current leases will be able to do so for 10 years at existing rates, said the state.

The downtown Rhodes Center is the former Rhodes Department Store, which was converted into the University of Puget Sound Law School. When UPS sold the law school to Seattle University, which moved the school to Seattle, the university sold the building to the state.

If you want to work at Microsoft, this year is a good time to apply.

The Redmond tech company has added more than 11,000 employees in the past year and now has nearly 90,000 workers worldwide, according to The Associated Press.

Much of the growth came from acquisitions, such as the 2,600 employees in aQuantive, the Seattle-based digital advertising company.

As of the end of May, Microsoft had nearly 39,000 employees in the Seattle area, the AP reports.

Microsoft has been expanding its headquarters campus in Redmond and leasing space in Bellevue and Seattle.
A spokesman, Lou Gellos, says the company is looking to see what space is available in Seattle.

A court ruling this week laid out more protections for private text messages that we all know you're sending via your work-issued devices. Now corporate employers must have either a warrant or the employee's permission to see text messages not stored by the employer, according to an AP story I spotted at Business Week.

It appears to be a win for privacy and for flirty texts sent from those long work meetings, where you might very well be reading this post on your work-issued device. But, remember, emails are still fair game.

Here's more from the story:

Corporate e-mail has typically been stored on a company's own servers or on server space it pays for, which employers control, according to federal law. Text-messaging has typically been managed by outside providers.

The lower court had ruled that employers have access to text messages because they're stored by the outside contractors, but the 9th Circuit found that the storage was incidental. Greater privacy protections apply, the court said, because employers are paying only for messaging services.

It's not clear, however, how employers should now manage the relationship with an employee who splits the bill for a work-issued cell phone or other message device, a common arrangement.

In that case, the employee might be reluctant to give his employer full access to his text messages, since some are presumably personal.