| Government "monopolized" these functions? Does it mean there is an established mechanism that discourages innovation in private sector, i.e. punishes innovators with higher taxes or imprisonment or what? Hey, Microsoft and Apple have tons of cash and do nothing interesting with it. The reason behind 'sudden' GM's death isn't shitty cars, they've been shitty for a long time. GM is dying because instead of trying to build a decent car business it essentially transformed itself into a bank (GM Financial) which found nothing better to do with their cash than "invest" them in guess what. Now look at startups: have you ever seen a TechCrunch announcement that was in any way memorable? I see nothing but a never-ending conversion of MySQL tables into HTML pages, or wrapping OSS projects into HTML/JS UIs hoping to get rich quick: the distance of their "R&D trajectories" are measured in months and working prototypes are expected within weeks from the first napkin drawing. Now look at Google, a poster child for "SV magic". Google is a creation of two Stanford students, i.e. an academia project turned into business (just like Symbolics and DEC had grown out of MIT). Entrepreneurship or corporate R&D had nothing to do with Google's success what-so-ever. Businesses don't give a shit about innovation, technology and science. Their goal has always been quick profits, for which there always seems be some kind of a scheme to take a ride on. Look what IBM, HP, AT&T and Xerox, former think tanks, transformed themselves into. IBM especially grosses me out with their "we're a services company" bullshit. So is my pet sitter. It is corporate never-ending search for increased efficiency that essentially kills innovation because the process of inventing is terribly inefficient by its nature: it's unpredictable, cannot be put on schedule, you can't budget for it and the outcome isn't guaranteed: find me one MBA who'll like any of the above. I've never been especially smooth with my writing, given that English isn't my first tongue, but Phillip Greenspun has:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg |
Business innovates because there are huge profits to be made in making people's lives easier and better off. Government doesn't innovate. It merely saps innovation that would have occurred in the private sector.