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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.'"

5 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. The price of Capitalism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Mojo back? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Simple by aekafan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Not that tech in particular is too badly off, b by sqrt(2) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
  5. Re:those are all multinational companies by strangluv2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.