Slashdot Mirror
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.
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']
"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.
I'm going to have to take a shower after writing this, but I agree 100% with John C Dvorak on this subject.
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.
No, government-free energy implies more nuclear. Excessive government regulation of nuclear power has artificially increased the cost of nuclear power beyond reason. Nuclear power has a far lower cost of operation.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
>>>Government-free energy implies more coal power plants.
Vice-versa government-run "cash for clunkers" means perfectly good cars were taken off the road, squashed, and thrown into landfills. The government didn't even bother to strip the parts and sell them (recycling), but instead declared that to be illegal. Had a private megacorp done that they'd be pilloried but when government does it, it's labeled a success.
Next up - "cash for breakers" where people are encouraged to break their windows and buy all new ones.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The hardest part about long term waste storage is getting people to give it as little thought as they give the millions of tons of material pumped into the atmosphere by coal power plants (and it is becoming clear that they actually put more radiation into the environment than nuclear, so it isn't just a matter of the potential problems associated with the CO2).
The idea of creating institutions that need to stand for thousands of years is a little scary, but I'm a lot more scared of turning off the lights.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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
We've had the technology since the 60s to build reactors that don't produce fuel "waste". The only thing standing in the way of progress in the field for the last 50 years is government interference and anti-nuclear hysteria.
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.