| Not innovative it was... American measures of creativity are narrow minded, short sighted, taken from singular point of view. The first two domestic microwave ovens in the Ussr were: first one, built without a magnetron, with "surplus" solid state RF emitters because all magnetrons were spent on military radars; second one, made with multi-kilowatt, water cooled klystron and weighted 60 kg, because the designer thought "with klystron, we can modulate the power with a cheap rheostat" without having to use "complex, tricky, always breaking mechanical timers." "USA does not have talent to build kitchen appliances out of super duper expensive mil-spec components?" - will ask some. No, but US simply never had conditions that would've required creative solutions to problems like "how to make consumer goods when the whole country has been turned into a munitions factory?" What I can jab commenters above with is that behind each "particularly creative" article an American big co. releases, there are thousands of anonymous engineers, designers, software developers and many other highly skilled people working in outsourcing sweatshops in Asia. For each "creativish" GUI app, there are thousands of research hours of anonymous geniuses that went into fundamental research in computer science and electronics engineering that made it possible that you can carry computing power of a supercomputer from few generations ago in your pocket. Now, how many artsy, creativish, anorexic tech CEOs there are in US who are, say, epitaxy metrology specialists who know how to grow 3D transistors with 10 times fewer mask scans than a competitor? |