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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.'"
No, it's not the same thing. When the govt. gives a financial lifeline to a failing company, it's doing so to prevent hundreds of thousands of "consumers" being unable to consume because they have no jobs to earn enough to buy anything. This has an effect on other areas of the economy further down the line who had nothing to do with the actions of the failing business. It is only right that the govt. specifies some positive changes in behaviour from the companies in return. If they had changed before they failed, they probably wouldn't have failed.