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Former Intel CEO Andy Grove Wants Struggling Industries To Stop Slacking
lousyd writes "Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and current instructor at Stanford Business School, has a message for industry. He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history. He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was. On the issue of computer patents, he insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: 'You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger.'"
A "use em or lose'm" rule would be good for fixing the patent troll problem, but it would do nothing to prevent software companies from attacking free software or from ruining standards.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was.
Perhaps there would have been more supercomputers? Or the internet would have arrived sooner and networking would be more advanced? None of us know what would have happened. Assuming it would have been worse is just speculation.
... and then they built the supercollider.
You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger
Beg
to
differ,
twice,
three times and maybe even
four!
Government-free energy implies more coal power plants.
Few energy companies are interested in multi-billions long term investments in energy efficiency & renewables.
The path of least resistance is coal, which also happens to be the dirtiest solution.
I'm too lazy to do it, but I think if I looked hard enough, I'm pretty sure I'd find a giant heap of government subsidization in Intel's past. It might be disguised as tax breaks, favorable legislation, or some sweet no-bid contract deal, but I doubt many companies get to Intel's size without getting some help along the way from their friends in state and federal governments. They were just smart enough to get it done in a way that's a lot less visible than the "ZOMG I CAN HAZ BAILOUT" approach taken recently.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
People die because they can not get access to or afford health care, no so with Intel products.
Plus the U.S. Federal Gov requires that E.R.s treat those who can not pay*. Hey Andy, how about Intel give away CPUs, Chipsets, Motherboards and SSDs (w00t!) to those who can't afford 'em?
* So I've heard.
PS, no I did not read the article.
"Another business he believes to be ripe for disruption is health care. He complains that the industry seems to innovate much too slowly. The lack of proper electronic medical records and smart âoeclinical decision systemsâ bothers him, as does the slow-moving, bureaucratic nature of clinical trials. He thinks pharmaceutical firms should study the fast âoeknowledge turnsâ achieved by chipmakers, so that the cycles of learning and innovation are accelerated."
I don't think this guy understands how the healthcare industry works. We can implement a change with electronic medical records but when it comes to clinical trials and drug testing, it is not just bureaucracy that slows it down. The very nature of using human subjects as opposed to electronic devices means doing long and thorough testing, and we still don't have a complete picture of how everything fits together in the human body.
You do realize that, you're totally taking that and twisting it around, right? DARPA and the NSA demand results, they don't necessarily care what the cost is, but they do demand technological advancement or they will go elsewhere to get it. As opposed to the government tinkering in failing businesses giving them cash and pushing them around as to how to produce things for purchase by consumers.
It's not really the same thing.
The computing industry has received massive government subsidies. The Internet, high performance computing, CPU architectures, compiler construction, and plenty more was financed by DARPA and other US government agencies, as well as European and Japanese government function. The subsidies were in the form of research grants, technology transfer from government research labs, among others. Knowledge and technologies were also massively transferred in the form of graduate students, academics, and government researchers coming into the private computing sector.
There's nothing wrong with--it's government doing what it should be doing. But if Andy Grove thinks computing did it all by itself, he's kidding himself.
If other sectors (automotive, energy, transportation, environment, etc.) are supposed to catch up, the government needs to invest massively in basic and applied research, fellowships, and government research labs in those areas.
You want an example? Look at alcohol. Look at the deaths resulting from the widespread legal use of said drug, and tell me with a straight face that the answer is to unleash big pharma to make and market more chemical toys to play with.
yes, of course, the answer to a small part of the population mishandling something is prohibition. what about education? and your answer specifically implies that alcohol should be banned. yeah right, good luck with that. people only accepted prohibition of psychoactive drugs because they had available drug options, as well as of course the highly effective brainwashing techniques used to demonise the terrible drugs of the time - back in those days cannabis was the drug the filthy peasants used and that's why they attacked it.
fact is that people are using the drugs (amazing but true) anyway. and not enlarging the options for people is not helping, because it's a case of the devil you know. like meth, sure, it's got a lotta downsides, i know from personal experience. but what alternative is there?
at some point society as a whole is gonna have to really re-evaluate this whole business because the mess the current situation has created is a RESULT of prohibition. not the existence of any given drug.
lets say that somehow magically prohibition worked and all the illegal drugs suddenly evaporated. nobody was using illegal drugs. don't you think they'd turn to legal ones? do you even comprehend how big the legal drug abuse problem is now? oxycontin, vicodin, suboxone, valium whatever you care to name. legal drugs are more used in the wrong way than illegal ones. people use drugs for a reason and focusing on their behaviour when they misuse them is missing the point entirely.
Not to mention NASA. The market and private enterprise could never have put a man on the moon in 10 years. Government set the strategy and arranged for private companies to make it happen.
Note that the space program (and military) drove the creation of technology to create commercial integrated circuits. How convenient to forget the help that government provides after the fact.
Of course without that arrogance - perhaps he would never have become the effective manager that he once was.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
Lets not forget that IBM was involved in a massive, government funded, data processing project in Europe in the 1940s
On a less flippant note, the microprocessor was a direct product of the US nuclear missile program. Nobody was pushing for miniaturised computers until the government put billions into making it happen so they could fit a guidance computer on a missile.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/05/tob_minuteman_1/print.html
But that is the trick to being a good capitalist; rewrite history and claim you've never received any help from the government, and it was the 'genius of the market' which made you rich. Don't be afraid to wag your fingers at any other government subsidy though - because its all evil socialism!
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Let me address the real issue here. Just because the US has poorly managed it's infrastructure does not mean the rest of the world has. Capitalist fanaticism is just as dumb as communist or anarchist fanaticism.
For instance, the whole of Europe is covered by subsidized rail. Europe uses less than 20% of the energy that we do for transportation. Who is more efficient? France has a nuclear powered high speed rail system that is ridiculously efficient, clean, and well used. Just because lobbyists are directing all our infrastructure to the dead idea of highways and urban sprawl doesn't mean that subsidized rail is a bad idea. It means that rail and sensible land use aren't receiving as much money as they should.
The best illustration of the failure of US governance can be seen quite plainly in healthcare. I don't care what anecdote you have. Statistically, the rest of the world pays at least 35% less than what we do for health care, they live just as long, and they are happier with their system than we are with ours. This is because they have grown up and realized that the market solution is not always the best.
Another example is telecommunications infrastructure. Across the whole of Europe, well regulated broadband has covered nearly every inch of the continent with low cost, high speed internet access. Even in countries with similar population densities, like Norway and Sweden and Finland. Sure, you can find complaints. Give them the choice of a government option or a closed option like Comcast or AT&T, and you'll quickly discover that people don't want to be locked into a vendor. It would be like Georgia Power (where I live) only allowing Georgia Power appliances to use electricity. The liberation of American network access, if it ever happens, will be with corporations fighting to the bitter end to keep their profit margins intact, built not on their own dime, but the infrastructure subsidized by you and me from programs throughout the 90s.
You've swallowed wholesale the lie that corporations are better than government for everything. Just take a look at the 1880s before public outcry ended child slavery, 70 hour workweeks, unsafe working conditions, and crippling manual labor. That's the reality of corporate governance. These deplorable conditions didn't disappear, they were just outsourced to countries where the leaders are willing to exploit their workforce for kickbacks.
You can advocate an intelligent position, where corporations are kept in check by a more powerful and localized government, and the local government is kept in check by a powerful participatory democracy. Or you can advocate for the madness of money being the only metric by which success can be measured. You could munch on a Baconator while the rest of the world continues to improve through science and collective innovation, and we become an echo chamber of reality shows and televangelists and Fox News anchors, trying to convince a nation literally dying from it's own selfishness and gluttony that they're still #1.