Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

[Tom Ligon]

Certainly large companies can adapt and they have the advantage of resources. I think the problems lie in management attitudes. You can draw some generalizations, but you have to understand how those particular attitudes play in a particular company.

Kodak saw the digital camera coming ... they invented them. I actually bought a Kodak HD pocket camcorder a couple of months ago (really cheap, because it will soon be an orphan). Kodak never really got into the spirit, though. The youngest baby may not get the attention of the older kids. Yet clearly they understood that digital would be the death of their old rival Polaroid, and would eventually replace film. They saw, but without the vision to understand how fast this would happen, they lacked the specific manufacturing base and engineering machinery to churn new designs fast and get them into production, and in any case would have been doomed if they did not move production to Asia.

Blockbuster was going under fast, but got a shot of life when Netflix got cocky and pissed off their customers. The local rental shop has gone under, but my wife and I subscribe to an online service that delivers DVDs to us. We won't touch Netflix. They adapted.

A couple of problems plague many big businesses. They're now run by CEOs who are not actually employees. They are typically outsiders, picked for performance at totally different companies, and they work under contract. They don't really know the business. The stunning new successes are run by the visionaries who created them. Many of the old companies started out the same way, when an inventor happened to also understand how the invention would be needed in the market, and also had some business sense. Edison, Westinghouse, Hewlett and Packard, and the list goes on. Replace these people with outsiders who never had hands on the product, and the result is they start thinking the business is business instead of thinking of building products people will cry for.

[Netmaker]

Certainly large companies can adapt and they have the advantage of resources. I think the problems lie in management attitudes. You can draw some generalizations, but you have to understand how those particular attitudes play in a particular company.

...

A couple of problems plague many big businesses. They're now run by CEOs who are not actually employees. They are typically outsiders, picked for performance at totally different companies, and they work under contract. They don't really know the business. The stunning new successes are run by the visionaries who created them. Many of the old companies started out the same way, when an inventor happened to also understand how the invention would be needed in the market, and also had some business sense. Edison, Westinghouse, Hewlett and Packard, and the list goes on. Replace these people with outsiders who never had hands on the product, and the result is they start thinking the business is business instead of thinking of building products people will cry for.

Tom, I strongly agree with the points you're making but feel obliged to point out at least one extremely strong exception. Louis Gerstner coming from RJR Nabisco to run IBM and being credited with saving the company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner,_Jr.

On the other hand if they had brought somebody in who truly understood the challenge that Microsoft was and would present them and the opportunities available to them in what they considered the low end, marginal PC market, the computing world would be a different place.

[ogiw]

A couple of problems plague many big businesses. They're now run by CEOs who are not actually employees. They are typically outsiders, picked for performance at totally different companies, and they work under contract. They don't really know the business. The stunning new successes are run by the visionaries who created them. Many of the old companies started out the same way, when an inventor happened to also understand how the invention would be needed in the market, and also had some business sense. Edison, Westinghouse, Hewlett and Packard, and the list goes on. Replace these people with outsiders who never had hands on the product, and the result is they start thinking the business is business instead of thinking of building products people will cry for.

MBA wonderboys are a big part of the problem. Originally, MBA programs were taught by folks who moonlighted as teachers, and brought their actual expertise to the classroom. For some time now, most MBA programs are nothing more than an extension of the current cirriculum, taught by the same tenured idiots that have neither a day of actual experience nor a whit of common sense among them. In their classrooms, they teach minds filled with mush that all significant business problems can be solved easily by just choosing the right ratios to manage, and the correct formulae in their magic Excel spreadsheets.

Reality has hit them pretty hard. However, we're now dealing with several generations of MBA wonderboys, with the latest two having hired folks just like them from outside (often fresh out of school) instead of promotion from within. Result: a nominally "flat" org chart with byzantine cross-silo connections via convoluted process models (you remember, the things that were supposed to simplify and revolutionize everything in Known Space), that actually is quite top-heavy. Their most frequent strategy: cut costs. Their most frequent method: get rid of people that aren't like them, since they "don't understand". Their most frequent result: hollowed-out companies that have forgotten how to do anything.

There are whole swaths of companies like IBM that have completely forgotten how to do anything. IMO, this is a big part of the reason why, Tom.

[TallDave]

Yeah, I was wondering if that meant they were going to add another battery/cap bank or something. It seemed a little out of norm for what i thought I understood. Tom?

I wondered if maybe they need directional control, i.e. they might want to push more/less current from a given direction. Of course, I could be reading too much into it -- they might have been independently powered all along, and these are just bigger.

[pbelter]

Don't sound so discouraged PBelter, innovation is happening and eventually all those topheavy institutions gets knocked over, even if some of them manage to hold on for a few decades past their due date.

You are right on the money, the problem is that few decades here, few there and we don't get our portable fusion reactors, flying cars or honeymoon on the Moon.

There is a reason why US was always in a forefront of new technologies. It was a relatively free country that did not have the history to stifle new ideas in order preserve the old interests. This is changing right now, Detroit should have gone bankrupt long time ago and recovered by now with a new business model, instead they prolong its agony. It is not a coincidence that most of the new innovation originates from IT that is a brand new unregulated branch of industry. Musk runs Tesla and SpaceX on the money he made off PayPal and he has enough to pay off the lawyers and meet all the government requirements. When interviewed on how he accomplished that he said something along the lines that their first rocket launches involved a small offshore island in a little known country.

I used to work for a medical company that makes a medical test that contributed to saving my life once. It cost $13 to make but we were wholeselling it for over $300. By the time it gets to the consumer I bet is costs at least $600. We were making average 450% profit on all products if you compare cost of manufacturing to the sales prices, and at the same time we were barely profitable as a company. The difference went to regulatory compliance, primarily FDA. If we had to hire top scientists to make a better, cheaper product, or better managers/lawyers/lobbysts to save on regulatory costs, guess what would be our best bet?
Now if a brilliant mind is about to choose a career, in an environment like this what is their best bet?
At the same time the government thinks that the solution to the rising healthcare costs is more regulation...

It is hard to start a viable competition when most of your costs are regulatory and the cost or running the core business itself is secondary. Even if you did and produced a product a quarter cheaper at $10 which would be a significant technological achievement, I doubt the cost to the consumer would change and it probably would make only a small dent in the final price or in your overall profitability.

I think that if New World was not discovered we would still be between the late XIX to mid- XX century level of technology

Tom Ligon mentioned in another post that most Europeans did not go the the New World. So what did they get from its discovery? The gold didn't work that well for the Spaniards but now we got phones, TVs, computers all the other things invented in America. They would eventually be invented in Europe, it would just take more time when you have the old interests protected.

[Skipjack]

Looking at some of the big companies in my line of business, I see a lot of "innovation by buyout" going on. The big established companies spend more time and money on keeping the small startups down with lawsuits and whatnot instead of actually innovating. Laws are made such these days that they can milk their old IPs forever and ever instead of beijng forced to keep innovating to stay on top. This slows down progress.
Yet still every now and then a startup develops something new and innovative. They usually end up getting bought out though and never make it to market themselves, for the reasons mentioned above.
I dont know about you, but I dont see that as a desirable way...

[303]

hate to break it to ya, but neither television nor computers were invented in america, just fyi

[Tom Ligon]

Skipjack, I'm less than two weeks from retiring from one of those buyouts. The big company is not actually all that bad, but the little one, after offering itself up for consumption, wound up making itself hard to swallow. While the thrashing and coughing is going on, I'm dashing for daylight.

[Tom Ligon]

303, I'm sure you can argue for some part of TV being invented elsewhere (including telegraphic fax circa 1862), but the patent of Philo Farnsworth is pretty well known on this forum, and the practical commercial development was by RCA.

Computers have a long history, with significant contributions from around the world (and especially from England), but the practical embodiment of modern binary computers were brands like Univac, IBM, etc. developed in the US. Before that you had purpose-built number crunchers and sorters, typically working base ten and not generally programmable.

Now the punched card, well known among early computer users, IS a very old invention, I think dating back to the British, and originally used to program looms, which are arguably the ancestor of all modern computers.

[ladajo]

hate to break it to ya, but neither television nor computers were invented in america, just fyi

Dr. Farnsworth might argue about television.

Computer is a definitional issue.

For instance, MIT might argue the point of the first electronic computer(s).

[Aero]

The inventor of the electronic digital computer was an american of Bulgarian descent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff

Dr. Atanasoff and his research assistant, Dr. Berry, made their major breakthrough experiments just as the US was entering WWII. These results were not held closely by the Dr.s, rather commercial interests were invited to attend tests. And of course, multiplying two numbers together using patch cord input and adding machine number display output was very convincing. Both gentlemen left research to support the military efforts while others pursued their research direction to create a commercial product.

[KitemanSA]

Now the punched card, well known among early computer users, IS a very old invention, I think dating back to the British, and originally used to program looms, which are arguably the ancestor of all modern computers.

Looms, yes. British, no. French, mais oui.

[ladajo]

For instance, MIT might argue the point of the first electronic computer(s).

http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/20 ... whirlwind/

The incorporation of solid state components, video displays, RAM, etc is where I see the true foundation in real computers.

Thank god for the Cold War, for without the need for SAGE, this may have been delayed a while. It really was a leap forward.

One can argue "Computing" all the way back to the abacus or astrolabs, or many other mechanical devices with moving bits.
I say the modern approach started with SAGE and Whirlwind.

[GWW57]

For instance, MIT might argue the point of the first electronic computer(s).

http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/20 ... whirlwind/

The incorporation of solid state components, video displays, RAM, etc is where I see the true foundation in real computers.

Thank god for the Cold War, for without the need for SAGE, this may have been delayed a while. It really was a leap forward.

One can argue "Computing" all the way back to the abacus or astrolabs, or many other mechanical devices with moving bits.
I say the modern approach started with SAGE and Whirlwind.

Whirlwind was completed in 1951.
I think the Brits can push electronic digital computing back a year or two before then



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Mark_1

Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operational by April 1949; a program written to search for Mersenne primes ran error-free for nine hours on the night of 16/17 June 1949.



I used to work with someone who was on the design team for Mercury Autocode running in 1952 in Manchester and Cambridge - the first compiled programming language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocode

[93143]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#F ... _computers