[hkjgkjy]

While all us non-americans can gloat about what great consumer protection laws we have (and I'm very happy about them as a consumer!) it's not for no reason that all cool stuff is made by americans. They have the state of Delaware, and they have the government who prioritize business before social issues. Correlated (and if you ask me, causative (is that a word?)) is that most impressive companies and products are invented by Americans.

[Synaesthesia]

The main reason why "cool stuff" is made in America is because of massive government subsidy to the computer industry in the 50's, 60's and thanks to publically funded research (Bell labs, PARC etc). Again in the 80's under Reagan there was big investment in the computer industry as they recognized that Japan was starting to take the lead in tech industry.

[wcunning]

My understanding is that both Bell Labs and PARC were owned and operated solely by large corporations (AT&T and Xerox, respectively). Do you have a source on government funding of either?

[harshreality]

I don't know about the structure of PARC, but I suspect it's not quite as comparable to Bell Labs as you make it sound.

Weren't both of them funding some of their research projects via direct government (DARPA, etc) grants?

AT&T was a government monopoly. They had no meaningful competition that required rapidly innovating AT&T's core products, and they had lots of profit due to their monopoly status. They could afford to dump money into research (in addition to whatever gov't research grants they were getting) and still have plenty of profit left over. That's not quite government funding of research, but many economists will say that given its monopoly status, what it did was de facto government action.

PARC did some great things but they didn't have as broad a range of research as Bell Labs, did they? Xerox never had a monopoly like AT&T did, although I'm fairly sure they got plenty of government research grants.

There were also a lot of open fields in hardware and software that were just starting to be explored back then. Tech companies were investing plenty of brainpower and money into R&D, given little pushes by government grant availability. I think the difference in AT&T's case was the breadth of research due to how much profit they had... again, due to monopoly status.

[genericacct]

I Wouldn't be surprised if the DOD was the biggest customer for both.. "subsidy" doesn't mean they were owned or directly financed.

[ctrl-j]

Owned? No, it doesn't mean that.

Directly financed? I wouldn't call it a subsidy otherwise: https://www.google.com/search?q=subsidy&oq=subsidy

[abz10]

A subsidy can exist in effect when the terms are overly favorable and not at market rate.

[Aloha]

PARC never had substantive DOD funding, it was funded by the largess of Xerox. Bell Labs did do government work, but was largely funded by the Bell Operating Companies, in the form of a royalty.

[Synaesthesia]

Exactly, the biggest research driver is military spending. Procurement is a huge way in which these companies were funded, eg the DOD bought 90% of computers in the 50's and 60's before they became viable as consumer devices in the late 70's.

[TheOtherHobbes]

PARC is heavily DARPA-funded today. In the 70s, PARC hoovered up a lot of Stanford grads who had been working on government funded projects at SRI. It's unlikely PARC would have been as successful without them.

Bell Labs was independent, but there are similar indirect links - lots of freshly minted PhDs cutting their teeth on government funded research, then moving into industry.

Government seed funding was directly responsible for the Whirlwind and TX series projects, for IBM's SAGE system, for the work of important consultancies like Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, and the various ACs (Illiac, Multivac, etc) all of which laid the foundations of modern computing.

IBM, DEC, and eventually Apple and MS productised that work, but it simply wouldn't have happened without government support.

[susan_hall]

You might be interested in a book called The European Revenge, written in 1973 by two writers from the Economist magazine. It made the argument that some day in the near future, European auto makers, such as Mercedes Benz and BMW, would be able to make automobiles that were as good as American automobiles.

And they were correct. Mercedes Benz and BMW did eventually catch up to the Americans. Nowadays, many people would argue that Mercedes Benz and BMW represent a level of quality that is much higher than what you can get from American automobiles.

If Europe hasn't yet caught up to the USA in consumer electronics, perhaps that is because Europe hasn't yet made the concerted effort to catch up.

[Aloha]

I'd argue that as far back as the 30's European manufacturers were making cars every bit as good as those made in America.

That said, they were and are made to a different design ethos - American cars have never been designed for balanced performance like German cars have, they instead have been designed for comfort and trouble-free operation (meaning next to no maintenance). America long made the only car in the world that could go 100,000 miles with nothing but fluid changes, and other wear items. No European car can really do that, all of the German makes have a pretty aggressive preventative maintenance schedule.

Japan to an extent does build cars to the american ethos - they build to the American ethos, but localized to the Japanese market to a greater or lesser extent -but then again they were taught car building by the Americans after WWII - which is I think why Japanese cars have been so successful in the American market.

[Tinyyy]

I can't seem to find a book of that title, can you be more specific? Thanks!

[ars]

Or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12428925

Europe caught up, but the USA didn't stop, and now Europe is behind again.

[jhbadger]

Rather the cool stuff is made by the Chinese and Koreans, although sometimes according to American designs.

[saiya-jin]

apart from cars (discussions about Tesla are in another recent thread, others are not really worth mentioning) and couple of other stuff from europe/east asia from nearly any aspect of life, I tend to agree

[sangnoir]

> it's not for no reason that all cool stuff is made by americans

Damn straight - American TV's sure are the coolest of all!

[strictnein]

Yeah, you're right. Vizio is great.

Just bought a 50" 4K TV from them. It only supported Dolby's HDR out of the box. Firmware update added HDR10 support. The last time Sony, Samsung, etc decided to put the customer first in a stupid format war was... when exactly?

[sangnoir]

> Yeah, you're right. Vizio is great.

You might have missed this headline from July: "Vizio acquired by Chinese tech company LeEco for $2 billion"[1]

1. http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/26/12286756/leeco-buys-vizio-...

[strictnein]

Well son of a...

Yeah, I missed that.

[izacus]

When they pretty much killed off the American TV industry.

[Grue3]

TVs were considered cool maybe like, 50 years ago?

[collyw]

Are you being sarcastic?

[sangnoir]

> Are you being sarcastic?

Yes. I thought the sarcasm was self-apparent as the "all American TV manufacturers are shuttered" trope is well-worn and well-known (apparently not). A quick test would have been trying to think of one cool American TV model.