I think this is part of it. But als,o there were just so few companies who were doing serious R&D for technology. Breakthroughs were new and unique. These days there are so many different companies constantly innovating that breakthroughs are the expectation/norm.

That is an absolute silly notion. Money is a token of value, so if you're creating value for someone, it shouldn't be too hard to get some money for it.

Examples: The Internet, while initially a public research project, did not take off until it was commercialized. Personal computers and mobile phones - completely transformational technologies, the innovations of which went hand-in-hand with making tons of money. Google and Apple both innovates like crazy and they're two of the most valuable companies on the planet because of it. Much of the best open source software projects are off-shoots of commercial ventures.

Thats a pretty bold claim. Do you think this is true of all "tech" or just software? Do you think it similarly wasteful when a car manufacturer spends resources building yet-another-car?

> ... yet brilliant minds are still spending years building one IDE after another.

Who do you think _should_ get to decide what brilliant minds should spend their time doing?

Why though? It's all off the shelf stuff. If it's in phones you can put it in your product.

It is so easy to throw yourself into software, I wouldn't know where to start as an amateur with hardware, it involves electricity and circuitry and probably months of learning. An amateur can scratch together a proof of concept in a few weeks.

Yep, definitely. And it should do so on the dime of investors and early adopters, not the public.

So which system did they clone to become like this? Because if they are the first, I guess it is a lot of innovation.

Yet when Xerox and IBM were monopolies they were at their most innovative. Xerox had PARC. AT&T had Bell Labs. IBM had --- well I'm not sure but their mainframe architecture and OS was very innovative in its day.

Now that those companies are just one of dozens that do what they do, you can't name anything groundbreaking that they are producing.

There, the next unicorn - why only UK & Finland and not a Silicon Valley start-up as well? In the end it's just tech that requires investment, and God help us, there are plenty of venture capitalists looking for next unicorn. I mean the quantum computing field is so hot these days that everyday you find a new article about it.

The barrier is inventing and organizing the logistics of delivering the most cutting edge technology and the accompanying software and support to hundreds of millions of people around the world every year.

If anyone else could do it, they would do it. Samsung and Alphabet come sort of close.

Sounds like some IT departments I know.

That is not a fact of life or act of nature, but to a great degree it is a choice. Decades ago, engineers built many technologies that were conceptually simple, elegant, open, free-as-in-liberty, and hackable - not by accident, but to empower hackers and end-users. Those efforts created the environment, platforms and tools that the startups thrived on. What are today's engineers building for the next generation?

For example, I recently had to learn in-depth how computers boot these days - down in the weeds with ME, TPM, UEFI, SEDs, PXEs, GPT, and more:

First, the complexity of that small step to starting your computer is beyond an individual's comprehension; just one spec was 2,500 pages; many technologies' roles overlap and it's not clear why there is redundancy or how they integrate with each other. Perhaps there is someone who specializes in this narrow field as a full-time job and actually grasps it all, or maybe if I had a year to dedicate to it - but I can't imagine some new teenage hacker mastering it.

Second, much of it is proprietary or at least not free. TPM and ME, for example, are ultimately outside the user's control.

Compare that to the former system of POST - BIOS - MBR - boot loader. I'm not saying change is bad and that we couldn't have improved on it, but clearly nobody thought about making it hackable or empowering end-users.

I'll go a little further and say it reflects - I can't support a causal connection - a broader loss of interest in the 'American Dream', equality of opportunity (or at least an abundance of it for all), and empowering the little guy and underdog. The U.S. also cuts back education and other programs that give opportunity to less advantaged citizens, often with the idea that the powerful should not be hindered by taxes or government. Polls show interest in democracy is slipping, with the US government saying it's not worth promoting abroad (the White House and State Dept both explicitly said it) - democracy is political empowerment of the little guy; everyone gets a vote and is equal. Some political groups even explicitly argue that their group should dominate the others. I'm not starting a political debate; I'm just pointing out that it's a much different outlook.

Of course it is. The sector has been 'MBAified' after the first decade and a half. Its about extracting maximum value by providing the minimum. It happens to every sector - look at computer games. First decade is full of innovation and firsts. Then big corporations take over and consolidate the sector. Now its about milking what already existed by rehashing them.

> religious type words

They are not religious words. They are accurate words. Knowing the difference in between the attitudes in society and tech life are important in deciding what direction to go. Identifying destructive 'MBAification' (or whatever you may want to call it) of things as opposed to 'building' things and telling them apart is critical.

> I don't know what it could be that can be compared to fire and the wheel but Google and opensource isn't it

Wheel is exaggerated. People used other means before the wheel.

However Open Source is a major change in most attitudes. It even changed the hierarchical, feudal work relationships and organization that corporations inherited from early Victorian corporations. But that's a long topic that involves history and social sciences.

I've gradually come to appreciate that it's a bit silly to anthropomorphise mega-corps like MS, Apple, etc as a single entities, where such thoughts make sense.

At the top a lot of greedy self serving bullshit happens, which seems to be some sort of inevitable capitalistic or economic force of scale. But the effects of scale cuts both ways, hidden away individuals or whole teams will be doing their own thing based on a completely different set of principles and ideals. Although the umbrella they operate under burned my trust and patience long ago, I can still recognise the merit of tech that emerges from the individuals that work there.

This. I see a lot of the so call new idea and hype aren't actually new at all. It didn't succeed simply because it never got the investment or drive until it has sustainable critical mass. And every few years or decades we start to reinvent the wheel by new generation of developers.

Especially in tech industry where you are considered old if you are over 40, but in reality it is the age you finally see all the ideas keeps getting recycled again by newer generation and you could finally say meh, no.

Do you remember the progress of landlines? In 2000 (and beyond), some people were still paying extra per month for touchtone dialing. Extreme reliability comes at a large cost.

If everything had to be reliablr before it was released, we'd have a lot fewer things to try, and a harder time deciding what we liked. By shipping half broken stuff all the time, we can figure out what we like, and then make it reliable if it's warranted, or throw it away if that's the right choice.

Those that copy eventually stop copying and start innovating. See the US, Japan or Korea for examples.

> In terms of innovation, I don't see American goods as anywhere near as polished as their German counterparts. I would take the lowest spec. German car over any American car in current production without hesitation. The same applies to white goods and even cakes!

I'm not American but that's ridiculous. You're typing these words using (most likely) a CPU from a US company, on either a US-made OS, or one that contains really a lot of code from US software engineers. Bell Labs have defined a huge part of the modern software landscape. There is Edison, NASA, Boeing, Apple. And obviously, we have a discussion in a forum funded by a company whose business model is to foster innovation.

> But the software market is about to get a lot out of drug experimentation but I would recommend those who want to work will need to work.

Seems like overfitting a bit. But it's a super funny output.

Fully agree, and would extend to any social organization. One of the most important aspects of organizational efficiency is managing the signal/noise ratio of internal communications. We now have the ability to turn effective bureaucratic protocols into material reality with automated information systems.

The organizations, whether private or public, that best tackle this problem will come out on top on the 21st century, regardless of ideology and historical advantage.