Steelcase tops estimates

Grand Rapids-based furniture maker Steelcase reported on Wednesday first-quarter net income of $7.5 million, or 6 cents per share, on revenue of $639.4 million -- exceeding its own estimates.

The worst of the recession

"By staying invested in multiple growth initiatives while the worst of the recession, we established a strong foundation for the revenue growth which occurred across all of our segments," said James Hackett, president and CEO.

"We didn't specify damages, nevertheless I believe it's in the millions for the county and tens of millions for the state," Hertel said Wednesday in a telephone interview. "We intend to fight for it."

Wyoming has become the first state to begin using a suite of cloud computing tools from Google for its entire executive branch of government, allowing data and applications to be stored on remote servers and accessed over the Internet.

"Wyoming likes to be first, and that's a great message for us. This is kind of an early round in this innovation and for a company like Google, we need the right partners to work with," said Dave Girouard, president of enterprise for Google.