[yardie]

What the author is really trying to say is government funding of advanced technologies leads to innovations. He bases his arguments on the monopolies that existed at the time but correlation =/= causation. Everyone of the examples he sites had a huge amount of input from government funding. Bell Labs wasn't going to create UNIX on its own. ARPA funded Bell Labs developed UNIX. DOD invested money to get planes built, rockets built, and men on the moon. And once we beat the CCCP to the moon all that funding was dialed down.

He might as well be saying the lack of a competing super power is why innovation has stagnated. When I was in university there were a lot of ex aerospace engineers taking university lecturer positions (not even professorships, just teaching statics and mechanics). In fact there was a joke, which was irrelevant until the recent economic crisis, about the only job aerospace majors could get came with fries.

The stranglehold Microsoft had on the browser market brought new innovation at all. It was 3-4 years of IE sux (6). And now that Firefox has gone through 3 major visions it finally lit the fire under Microsoft's ass. The same thing for the iPhone. Windows Mobile...asleep at the wheel, Blackberry OS...asleep at the wheel, Symbian...still trying to get their act together. All of a sudden one maker makes a usable smartphone now everyone has a real browser, multitouch, and honest to goodness intelligently designed UIs.

This article is a bag of FAIL.

[rfreytag]

I agree and you might find this interesting...

Terrance Kealey makes an interesting case for how government funding (monopolies have got to have similar anti-competitive funding allocation properties), actually suppresses innovation: http://vimeo.com/4798314

[10ren]

A text search of ARPA on the wikipedia article for Bell Labs didn't find a match. Can you cite any evidence that ARPA funded Bell Labs? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Origin_and_historical...

The most famously innovative labs (PARC labs) was funded by a monopoly (Xerox).

[rfreytag]

Famously innovative does not to me imply most innovative. The article certainly did not make the case. The link at the bottom gives evidence to lead one away from your conclusion.

All a monopoly gets you is to have the innovation under one roof. Radio is a fine example of what happens when you have real competition instead of patents driving innovation. Instead of AT&T's multi-decade stagnation we had extremely rapid advance in technology in 20 years.

Of course we really can't rewind the clock, eliminate the monopoly/gov't funding and see how things might of panned out. You might enjoy Terence Kealey on this topic: http://vimeo.com/4798314