How America Can Get Its Tech Mojo Back

jfruhlinger writes "The American tech industry is hobbled by a poor education system, misguided spending priorities, and a byzantine patent system. But America can still come out on top, not least because of its longstanding tradition of individuality and private R&D investment. 'Open, distributed projects have the potential to outperform the traditional closed, controlled research model by reducing costs and duplication of effort, making it easy to collect and analyze masses of data from diverse sources, and allowing the best brains to participate no matter where they live.'"

Comments

Mojo back?

[stewbacca]

Get our tech mojo back? Errmm, what? Last I checked, tech giants like Apple, IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Google, and Facebook --to name a few-- are all American companies staffed mostly with American citizens.

Re:Mojo back?

[Mitiaj]

Those employed are mostly MBAs and LLMs. The real stuff is produced overseas.

Re:Mojo back?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an employee of one of the companies you listed I would counter that most, if not all, of those companies are all multinationals with R&D centers all around the world.

Re:Mojo back?

[SomePgmr]

I often wonder, and I'd like to see an article about that. It seems to me that when some health insurance company wants a web portal because they have to, or a city wants a new payroll system, they call an american consulting company to handle it... who farms out all the actual work to other countries and keeps the 90% difference. They call it "project management", and nobody actually cares if the project ends up being any good.

But when a high profile tech company develops something important that a billion people are going to use, do they really farm much out? If so, what are all those american thinkers doing employed at Google, Facebook, etc? I don't get the impression that those companies are all MBA's.

Re:Mojo back?

[gweihir]

If you look a little closer, these are _global_ companies, that were historically founded in the US, mostly employ non-US citizens and often do not even have the major mart of their operations in the US. But I guess that is a bit too much for you.

Re:Mojo back?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get our tech mojo back? Errmm, what? Last I checked, tech giants like Apple, IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Google, and Facebook --to name a few-- are all American companies staffed mostly with American citizens.

Apple: Made in China IBM: An Indian consulting company which also still makes servers (probably in China). Dell: Made in China HP: Made In China AMD: Spun off their foundry operations to Global Foundries, which I believe is a Singapore corporation.

Re:Mojo back?

[LordLimecat]

You telling me that most of Google's research takes place outside the US?

What about microsoft, mostly based in India? Or would one say that Redmond is their center of operations?

What about Intel, can you cite sources showing the majority of their ops outside the US? Everything I could find showed the majority of their operations occuring in the US (or at least more operations in the US than in any other country).

Some sources would be nice.

Re:Mojo back?

[TheGratefulNet]

in the US. by asians and indians. mostly NOT by americans.

bay area == cheap labor from overseas. I'm watching it before my eyes, as a resident here almost 20 years, now.

if you are in software and a 'white guy', forget about it. take up some other vocation. you will not get paid competitively and you will be let go once your project is over and/or you trained your replacement. use and dispose: that's what americans are good for.

this country has no future in engineering. we are all forced to become managers. god help us..

Uhh

[Kagetsuki]

Open and Distributed just opened up the project to the whole world. That helps America specifically how?

The price of Capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the biggest reason - the US is paying price for blind obsession with capitalism.

Money does not count for everything. Some of the cool technologies were group effort, incubated in universities around the country and not by corporates. By branding all altruistic efforts with Communism/socialism, the country has alienated a lot of creative types.

Start by counting Steve Jobs a salesman and not an innovator and that would be a good start.

Simple

[blair1q]

1. Stop being xenophobic gits and get back to the melting-pot culture that made this the best fucking country on Earth in the first place.
2. ???
3. Tech!

Re:Simple

[aekafan]

Could could you remind me exactly when this country, or for that matter, any other were not xenophobic gits? Hell when was that great fairy tale melting pot supposed to have occurred? Immigrants would come to this country, settle in an immigrant enclave, and then move to other areas of the country with similar immigrants. Welcome to Human Nature 101:Tribalism. There is no melting pot.

Why not share an infinite pie?

[FoolishOwl]

I'm sure I'm not the only one tired of the reflexive nationalism. The benefits of science and open-source technology can be shared by everyone, everywhere, and the more wide these things are shared, the more they grow.

Sure, I'd like to see better technical education in the US, and an environment more friendly to innovation, but I'd like to see that everywhere.

Re:The education system has been bad for tech for

[couchslug]

We need the OPTION of "pure technology" programs with no filler and no other goals than giving the student customer as much information and training in the field of their choice.

those are all multinational companies

[decora]

and they all have massive portions of their corporate bodies lying outside the jurisdiction of the united states.

Re:those are all multinational companies

[strangluv2]

Intel is 30% contract labor and looking to Beijing to outsource that also. It is shell of a company that has lost its way, and it is currently managed by a finance guy (Paul Otelini) as opposed to a technology guy (Gordon More, Andy Grove). If Intel had mojo, it would invest in its American workforce, instead of the current practice of using 'green badge' contractors and recycling that flesh on a yearly basis.

Re:Easy

[PPH]

Obligatory: Correlation does not imply causation.

Please explain why the Internet took off* when its technology was placed in the public domain, unprotected by patents.

*In the face of several competing systems promoted by everyone from AOL and Compuserve to Microsoft.

Croc of shit

[deodiaus2]

America's golden age was from 1945 to 1972. The manhattan project was successful mostly due to former German scientists fleeing WW2. The space race and subsequent Cold War was won using German rocket (Von Braun) & computer (Von Neumann) technology and subsequent spinoff & followons. Americans are masters of marketing who convince bright foreigners to come to the US to try to make it here. After about 20 years, most end up in the scrapeheap with their American classmates working as a Walmart greeter! Meanwhile, the ad men, marketeers, and lawyers live off the revenue stream for years to come.

Re:Not that tech in particular is too badly off, b

[sqrt(2)]

I don't buy that that's the problem when you have some corps paying ZERO taxes, and many even receiving money from the government despite pulling in record profits.