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The United States Losing "The Tech Edge?"
Ed Matthews writes " Yesterday's Wall Street Journal profiles the coolest gadgets that either aren't available in the USA or are slow to emerge. It questions whether the U.S.'s reliance on PCs is a ball and chain, and highlights the mistake made by the US in not adopting a single standard for wireless communication.
It also refers to the cell-phone carriers as "slow-moving, bureaucratic," and "having a chokehold on innovation."
The regular B section requires a paid login, but you can read Walter Mossberg's column for free." Having dealt with the US-cellular companies for the last two weeks, and been extraordinarily unhappy with one company that's sucked away fourteen off my life, I'm curious what everyone else thinks will be the emerging technology - and where it will be.
fff
Anyone who thinks that the web was "invented" is either an idiot or someone who is massively naive.
... Uh, never mind.
Clearly you haven't been keeping up. Al Gore was the father of the internet, and he's not an
It's a commonly made mistake. The Internet is an evolution of various standards/protocols.
The world wide web, OTOH, is a specific protocol specifically invented by one person.
Read this Time magazine article which describes this in greater detail, and explains why he made their top 20 inventors of the century list.
"Unlike so many of the inventions that have
moved the world, this one truly was the work
of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the
light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his
lab working on it. William Shockley may have
fathered the transistor, but two of his
research scientists actually built it. And if
there ever was a thing that was made by
committee, the Internet--with its protocols
and packet switching--is it. But the World
Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He
designed it. He loosed it on the world. And
he more than anyone else has fought to keep
it open, nonproprietary and free. "
Damn man, you must be drained. That's almost one and a half cats there, for christ's sake.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Ha! Even the American cellphone firm you mention isn't a proper American. It's half US (The Bell part) and half European - AirTouch is owned by Vodaphone, a British wireless company.
That's actually not that far off. Numerous British groups back in the 60s found out lousy and variable our voltage systems are when half their instruments wouldn't work without voltage regulators. Robert Fripp (King Crimson) has described how the Mellotron (which works by playing an analog tape at variable speed to control pitch; effectively an analog sampler) would get disasterously out of tune due to American power fluctuations.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Another thing you have to ask is how many of these other countries have invested as much in the Land based telecomunications industry as the US??? Some of these places have skipped a whole generation of technology and moved right into the wireless age. How much will it cost someone in Europe or Asia to get broadband access to their home.??? (not that it's totaly available in the US yet) I bet it's a lot more expensive than the US.
I'm not getting into the political flame-war that is sure to erupt here, but...
there are still many places in USia that don't even have electricity yet!
Like where, the Ozarks and the Grand Canyon?? Las Vegas, fer crissakes, is in the middle of the freaking desert, and is the biggest single consumer of electric power in the world.
Ok, look here. It may not be worthwhile to pull electric cables to every nook and cranny of the US, but I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that there are many more residential areas in Europe than in the US that are still short on power, plumbing and pavement. But they do have Cellular coverage. Here's why.
The wired-telephone infrastructure is so pitifully BAD in many areas of Europe, that putting in a Cell tower is much more cost effective. In the US, the post-WWII boom in the economy enabled running phone-lines to everywhere; while in Europe, whatever money was available was spent on rebuilding HOUSES.
Hell, these same criteria are almost certain to result in the invention of the teleporter in either Asia or Africa; not because their scientists are more brilliant than the US or European ones, but simply because they do not have a good road system out that way, and so would get more bang for the buck out of the technology. Necessity is the mother of invention; not Socialism.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
This particular "best mind" flocked to the US because of the ridiculously high material standard of living available to computer programmers. No bureaucrat was telling what to do (apart from when I was on government projects - I have heard that isn't to different here).
<flamebait>
As much as I like it here, I often wonder about the overall sanity of a country where the shooter has a right to carry his gun, but the shootee does not have a right to hospital treatment.
</flamebait>
Only two years until I move back. I wonder what I'll miss most?
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E_NOSIG
Common misconception.
It isn't the best technology that survives in the US. It's the best marketed technology which survives in the US.
That's why you have:
Hell, even your electricity sucks. :)
And that's just off the top of my head.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
There's a european magazine, T3 (like the line), that focuses on IMHO, babes, cars, and toys. Apart from all the toys that are availible to them in the UK, they have a section for stuff still stuck in Japan. I think the flow is Japan -> Europe -> USA. It's a bit pricy, but well worth it.
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Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Of course, our marketing frenzies occasionally produce antitrust violations, and we have to live with more advertising per square inch than any other industrialized nation, but who cares? It's the all-important Digital Age! Go, USA! Whoo!
Now, where's that flag for the back of my pickup truck?
This shows one of the main limitations of the laissez-faire capitalism that USia endorses over the more rational policies implemented in the rest of the world. When corporations are as unfettered as they are in USia, getting them to agree on things like standards is a herculean task - each corporation is assured that it has the One True path.
In Europe OTOH they're more used to being told what to do by more socialist governments, and the idea of a standard is more easily applicable to the way they work within regulations anyway.
Also, you have to remember that USia is such a huge place that establishing the kind of mobile phone networks that are seen in Europe is extremely difficult - after all, there are still many places in USia that don't even have electricity yet! I'd say that was a priority over the wireless revolution.
Why would I want a web-browsing cell-phone? I have a web-browser at work, free local phone calls for my ISP at home, cheap good computers, and I actually have a cable modem at home. The amount of time I'd actually want to use a thing with an vanishingly tiny screen to browse the web or use e-mail is quite small.
Maybe we don't have them because neither need nor want them. Goodness knows there's nothing that special about the technology... they don't have some sooper-secret chip-making process that produces 100 GHz Pentium Pros... then I would be worried. The power of desktop computers lies with their generality.
Let's face it, even though print media was invented over 500 years ago, there are still billions of people who read print media from time to time. The glib catch phrase that it is *so* 20th century (for example) when applied to print media makes it sound that there are maybe three people left on the planet would read print media. When in fact the people on the cutting edge are not the majority by any means.
Long ago, and far away, when I lived on another planet and worked in retail repair shop, I would often tell customers hungry for the latest gadget that "If you can buy it, it is already obsolete".
Point being that 1) you can get into an endless treadmill trying to keep uyp with the technology and every new toy; and 2) even tho plenty of new tech toys will being coming out, the vast majority of technologies will stay around in some form for a very long time to come. Alot of folks will not change out a working solution to a problem just because of razzle by a technology spin doctor. Yes, there are problems in waiting too long, but on the other hand there are still lots of businesses who are **still** running on a paper system, never mind something as archaic as a dos boook keeping system on a 286
So this worry about the technology edge has some truth, but it is not nearly as dire as panic would suggest.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"Ideally, if consumers are abused, they will take it out on the company by complaining, or just moving to another product. Then the abusing company either rights their ways or dies."
And how exactly can a consumer complain or boycott companies which are virtual monopolies on necessities? You just can't. You have to eat, you have to have some sort of clothes, you pretty much need electricity and hot water. Also, voting with your wallet just means that the rich get a bigger vote. Boycott all you want, your vote doesn't count.
"I don't think it's the system that is broken so much as the consumer these days. This, I feel, is one of the biggest problems in America today. People don't accept their responsibility as consumers. I think that a lot of people are just too taken in by marketing to sit down and rationally consider their choices."
I think it's both. Corporations feed the consumers what they think they want to hear, and the consumers overloaded with pandering, just pick the ritziest presentation. Something is wrong when companies start spending considerable, if not more, money on advertisement and packaging, than actual product. If there were actually choice, then it would be the consumer's fault. But I think in many cases there is no choice, or the choices are just equally bad (so, how exactly are you going to *choose* the company with saner gasoline prices? you can't, they're all fixed the same).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The advantage that Europe and Japan have over the US is that they have greater population density, making technologies that can take advantage of it, such as wireless and public rail transportation, much more cost-effective. It's a simple matter of geography, nothing more.
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At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Not to mention that in the Europe, cell phone technology was developed first. In fact the first ever deployment of a cell phone system happened in the Britian, with the help of phone giant Nokia.
It's true that the US is losing it's traditional technical lead to the upstarts like Linux and Nokia.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
Marketing and advertising also have an effect. First of all, they exploit the fact that humans operate heuristically, not algorithmicly, for decisions (for the reasons of limited bandwidth I mentioned above, and also because of the reality of how human minds are constructed.) After all, only a tiny percentage of our mind's processes are conscious and thus amenable to pure rational analysis - the process of rational analysis relies on the pre-rational, pre-conscious acts of perception by which we mentally create the 'facts' that we are analyzing.
Obviously, if you couldn't sell cars and computers with images of sex and power, there wouldn't be a several hundred-million dollar advertising industry that thrives by doing so.
Additionally, even for the theoretically rational consumer, there are always time limit - ultimately, our mortality, and realistically, the constraints on how much time we can go without deciding.
With globalization and cheap assembly farming, having an edge in hardware doesn't do much in the long run.
Nobody questions that the japanese have been really good at gadgets and electronics, but over the decades, the shift has been away from the hardware (which becomes a commodity) to the software, which is the key. Apps have been growing more intelligent and complex, and the software that drives them makes the difference. Both Europe and Asia have been far behind the US in software innovation. This is primarily cultural - teenage mavericks are celebrated in the US and viewed with alarm or contempt in traditional, bureaucratic societies like those of Europe or Japan.
When the industry is new, the focus is on who makes innovative, cheap devices. For example, in the early days of the PC industry, the debate was about the IBM clones and who would win the manufacturing marketshare. However, in hindsight, making PCs is a commodity industry, like bottling coke. The key industry became the software.
The handheld/mobile industry is very new, so people are worried about who is making the coolest gadgets, but it's what drives those gadgets that will count in the end. And for some reason, Americans are really good at software. The culture of non-conformity, lack of bureaucracy, unregulated teenage hackers running wild, spawns the most exciting stuff that comes out on the web.
the quality control and solid manufacturing base of Europe and Asia makes it good for hardware/electronics, not software. Kinda like a repeat of the PC era.
w/m.
An interesting tale over at 2600 about how Verizon have been aware of their suckiness for some time now.
Ideally, if consumers are abused, they will take it out on the company by complaining, or just moving to another product. Then the abusing company either rights their ways or dies. This same reasoning can apply to standards acceptance and environmental issues. The consumers have the ultimate power (and, in fact, responsibility) in correcting corporate behavior. This is the system, and it all seems reasonable to me.
So why does it break down? I don't think it's the system that is broken so much as the consumer these days. This, I feel, is one of the biggest problems in America today. People don't accept their responsibility as consumers. I think that a lot of people are just too taken in by marketing to sit down and rationally consider their choices. In the case of MS, I think companies have been too short sighted to realize that they'd be better off telling Gates to take a hike. Maybe then MS would shape up. Instead, companies take the short-term easier route of sticking with Windows, and MS continues to get away with murder. A very good point -- and one that I think is often ignored. There are some real disadvantages to being big. American infrastructure simply can not adjust as quickly as that of smaller nations.
--Lenny
Computer networks and cheap PCs. That's about it.
What happens is that innovative new technologies are invented in the UK, fail miserably because the financiers couldn't tell a good idea if it was rammed up their arse sideways.
The Japs grab the idea with both hands and run with it, make a fortune.
Progressive European countries import idea and technology from Japan to Europe.
The UK is dragged into the new technology kicking and screaming that the bloody Europeans are trying to take over the world.
The UK inventor dies unknown and penniless with enormous debts which cause his family to be cast into the streets and have his house reposessed.
Americans re-invent the technology but make it incompatible. Claim they invented it first.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
CDMA is superior to GSM. The vocoder has better voice quality-- mostly due to the mathematics involved with the convolutional encoder. AT&T has also proved that CDMA voice quality is better. GSM is a good standard no doubt about it. CDMA came later, and in my opinion is more elegant. Because the same frequency band is shared, CDMA supports things such as soft handoffs meaning less dropped calls. CDMA has a 'rake' receiver meaning that signals bouncing off walls and other object actually INCREASE the voice quality. This is not the case for GSM. There are many more reasons that justify my statements above. I urge you to study CDMA a little more.
I would tend to disagree with Walter Mossberg's column. There are certainly a lot of things available overseas that have yet to migrate to the US (I ocasionally have a friend of mine form Hong Kong bring me the latest things.) And granted that our cellular phone infrastructure is inferior and inefficient compared to Europe's. But I don't know that we are really all that far behind. To my mind, Mossberg failed to site any real examples of technologies where the US has been surpassed.
Regarding wireless interent access I would argue that Americans have the edge, with the Palm VII, and the OmniSky adaptation for the Palm V/Vx, and with the HandSpring (assuming they ever release any non-vapourware cards...). I don't know anyone who uses their Cellphone for wireless 'Net access, and quite frankly I would much rather check my e-mail on something with a screen large enough to display more than 3 or 4 lines of text, I would be uncomfortable with the notion of buying stocks on(wireless)line if I was unable to fit more than the ticker symbol on my screen. For me it seems that the ability to access the internet with something as small as a cell phone, will be little more than an gimick until they have a much better way to present data.
In term of 'Net appliances, we're way far behind in some irrelevant ways: I don't know if anybody remembers but I think that there was a service by which people in Japan could access news, purchace stocks (maybe), and do other simalar things using their Nintendo (remember that 8-bit thing, we had as kids?) And the French have had something similar to that for decades.
Nonetheless Mossberg seems to have forgotten that the idea of web appliaces has been tried here. It won't play cool games but we do have things like webTV, which would look just fine next to the Cable box on the TV in your kitchen.
The thing about PC's (why American's still love them and why I believe that they'll be around for many years to come) is their versility. People want something that they can surf the 'Net on, and keep track of their finances with, and write documents with, and play games on, and securely and privately store lots of information on (read mp3s these days). It is the great versility of the PC that makes it such a staple of technology. Compared to other web appliances it's a much more open option - we don't even think of putting a new hard-drive into a PC as "hacking" but doing that with a web appliance is a major achievement.
In today's world I don't think that there are many of us who are on the go so much that we need to access our e-mail from anywhere and everywhere all the time. Nor does there appear to be much demand for the limited (web surfing) capabilities of current info appliances. As for the future, we'll see but for right now I would argue that the US is not behind where it counts.
credo quia absurdum
Before everybody jumps to blame the wireless providers (don't get me wrong, they are part of the problem), I think that it is important to also look at what the government has done to limit the wireless providers.
There are 2 bandwidths open for cellular communication in the USA 800Mhz (std. cellular) & 1900MHz (PCS). These all use the CDMA technology invented by Qualcomm, a US Compnay. Most countries in the world are slowly switching to this technology, as it is a *much* better technology for cell phone use.
Anyway, back to the point. For the 800MHz bandwith, the FCC has divided it up into 2 channels per market (A & B...The FCC then gave the A channel & B channel to a different service provider (I believe each gets 10MHz per channel)) The 1900MHz spectrum is divided into 6 different channels. (The A,B&C channels are divided into 60MHz ranges, and the D,E&F channels are divided into 20MHz per channel)
In Europe (and Asia), the wireless spectrums are not broken up into 2 (or more) seperate channels, which gives the providers much more bandwith to serve things other than voice. But I don't believe that their dominace is going to last much longer. Recently, the final Specifications for CDMA2000 (as opposed to CDMA One, which is used right now) have been released, and should be implemented by 2001. This was designed with the limited bandwith in mind, and will *guarentee* 384kbps internet access for your cell phone (as opposed to 14.4k/s)
s
Doh!
Remember HDTV? The US was supposedly so far behind in HDTV. The Japanese already adopted a standard, blah, blah, blah. Well, it turned out that the Japanese adopted a crappy analog standard and the US digital HDTV standard is probably going to win out in the marketplace after all.
As for cellular, in Finland everybody has a cellphone, and this is somehow bad for this US? Who wants to access the Internet through a stupid cell phone with a numeric keypad? WAP sucks and everybody in the know, knows it. Americans will adopt wireless Internet technology in droves when it actually has something to offer them. Don't be surprised to see it turn out just like HDTV. We'll see what the third generation wireless stuff has to offer and go from there. I for one don't think we should push wireless just because some jealous Europundit told us to.
Competing wireless standards? Sure, we got 'em. That's called the marketplace. And BTW every cell phone in the US falls back on a common analog standard to allow universal roaming if need be.
The US firms should get over their fear of standards bodies and try putting long term interoperability and ease of use over short term earnings reports and shareholder satisfaction.
The problem is that US firms cannot put anything before profit and shareholder satisfaction. It's because of they way they're structured. Their only purpose is to turn a profit for their shareholders, and if they do not, then their direcors will be replaced in favor of a group that will. Of course, customer satisfaction plays a role in the successful corporation, but only to the extent that it maximizes profit.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
The UK kicks all of our ass in wireless technology/cool stuff to have. And I'm not even going to talk about Japan, that stuff makes me want to cry...
The UK and Japan are both much smaller geographically. The US is big, and Canada bigger still. In addition, Canada has far less people than the US, making the cost per person per square mile potentially much higher, and total geographical coverage unrealistic.
While I agree that the US government really dropped the ball by not imposing a standard at some point and we will (and are) paying the price (imposing standards and a level playing field for competition are two very legitimate uses of government regulation -- imagine if our railroads weren't of a standard gague, our highways didn't have standardized signs, our cars didn't have safety and emission standards, etc. etc.), it is geography more than "socialism" vs. "capitalism" that is at play here.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy