[dmix]

University grants are a different beast. I was addressing the direct investments made in two organizations.

The problem isn't the perception of government backed businesses being 'wrong' for profiteering (or competing with industry?). Most people would be happy if the government made successful organizations that had a real impact (NASA in the 1960s). But successful large-scale government projects are rare today. Any gov tech gains in the past couple of decades were usually a minor side-effect of other massive investments (see: wars, intelligence gathering).

Modern nation states are simply not known for being good speculative investors nor good at running projects efficiently or cost effectively. Even when it's via private industry collaboration. But they are good at being politicians (ie, creating tax policy, managing regulations, etc). So my view is that they should focus on that and let industry be good at building technology.

[simonbarker87]

I was at a conference a couple of years ago and there speaker was proposing that government taxation of tech companies should be higher (or words to that effect) as the underlying tech foundation they were building on was all government funded in the past. I really wish I had a photo of the slide but an amazing amount of the fundamental technology we take for granted today started life as very expensive, commercially unviable readership funded by governments. Their summary was that government is the only place that can fund and progress the technology foundation that companies later build on top of and that the idea that government is bad at tech is wrong - they are just bad at tech when funding is slashed to a minimum. Their main example was Bell labs and semiconductors and then the internet from what I remember.

I don't think the problem is government, the problem is funding - companies with limited funding would do an equally bad job of tech as a government department