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Former Cisco CEO: China, India, UK Will Lead US In Tech Race Without Action
Mickeycaskill writes: Former Cisco CEO John Chambers says the US is the only major country without a proper digital agenda and laments the fact none of the prospective candidates for the US Presidential Election have made it an issue. Chambers said China, India, the UK and France were among those to recognize the benefits of the trend but the US had been slow — risking any economic gains and support for startups. "This is the first time that our government has not led a technology transition," he said. "Our government has been remarkably slow. We are the last major developed country in the world without a digital agenda. I think every major country has this as one of their top two priorities and we don't. We won't get GDP increase and we won't be as competitive with our startups. The real surprise to me was how governments around the world, except ours, moved."
that "digital agenda" means free corporate welfare from the government to pay Cisco to do what Cisco ought to be doing on its own: Make networking gear that people want to buy.
...and it's saying "we can't live in North America with the crappy wages STEM jobs pay".
tech bubble anyone?
aka my company hasn't been pandered to enough and been given generous tax incentives to outsource more people to south america and india
Those are the only 2 places where the money is going to come from.
The Gov, though primarly from a specific party... wants to cut as much from Gov spending as possible. Stoke the 'Tech Race' on the Govs dime? What planet are you from?
The Corps? They're hoarding record profits. What philanthropic bone do they have that they would benefit from this? Perhaps if it provided them tax breaks, but beyond that, the majority would scoff at the idea. And the Tech leaders? As long as they can get more people using their brand, sure, they'll throw a learning conference.
So where does that leave the rest of us? Sitting on the sidelines, arguing over technological stagnation, while fueling an imagninary ego, because we 'educate' the 'best' in the world.
All the old fossils still wasting space in congress have no idea how to function in the modern age, yet are somehow re-elected year-by-year. Obvious term-limit issues aside, we need to bring in folks who have some vision for the future.
What a bunch of nonsense. The US has by far the most developed ecosystem for tech startups, the source of real innovation, not fossils like Cisco. That there is no "digital act" in place does not mean the US is falling behind anything. I gather that was targeted for the UK to catch nationalist non-sense, but those people tend to forget who is the country that created the internet in the first place, where Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are based and in general, where most of the new cool stuff keeps getting created, from Uber to Tesla. So good luck with that envy.
Because it seems the US likes technology plenty. The US is a bastion of high tech research and production. Intel, AMD, nVidia, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Broadcom, IBM, most of the big names in chip technology are US companies with US R&D centers, and many of them have a lot of US production. That's just one example, you can point to plenty of other technologies that the US does a ton in, it is just a good one since those chips tend to underlie our digital devices these days.
Same deal on the purely digital side of things, namely software. The US is a mainstay in virtually every segment of software.
So what is this "digital agenda" that the US so desperately supposedly needs to not fall behind? Because they seem to be doing well.
Also as an aside, what's wrong with being #2 or #3 in something? I've visited a number of other countries, and by definition not all of them are #1 at most things. They are still very nice places to live and I have no issues. Seems that between #1 and "stone age shithole" there is a whole range of "quite nice places to live". So who cares if China is #1 at something?
We don't need a government agenda. Our private sector provides the best technology in the world in the free market.
Overall, the US "style" is to let the marketplace set the pace and direction of change rather than government initiatives to "guide" the market. Whether that's good or bad is a long and complex topic.
If the other industrial nations actually start to clearly kick our butt using government initiatives, then voters may change their usual preference.
Besides, we have our bloated military as the govt's techie playground. It's our version of socialistic R&D, one even Republicans like.
Table-ized A.I.
The US can't have any policy agenda on anything. The Wrong People might benefit. Depending on your perspective, The Wrong People have the bad gender, or the bad skin color, or they're too rich, or they're from the bad country, or the bad states, or they have the bad religion, or the bad politics, or the bad associations, or the bad hobbies. Or they're insensitive to people who deserve special consideration. Or someone might make a profit. Or someone might pay less in taxes. Or someone might not get set-asides. Wages might not meet "living wage" standards. An animal might get hurt or stressed out. Someone might spend Too Much on advertising and marketing. Or everyone might not benefit from it equally. Or it might not save the planet fast enough. That's why we can't do it.
How about you get rid of your fucktrillion dollar debt first then think about the digital world and GDP for that..
The implication of the article is that government is better at figuring out where to go digitally than business. If you've ever been in a government office...say, a post office, tag agency, courthouse, whatever, you'll see just how up-to-date and visionary the government is when it comes to technology. This is not unique to the United States. Why would we want to hobble ourselves by having the government set the pace for our digital future?
The U.S. has confiscated all the oil in the world to back up the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. This strategy works perfectly well, so there is no need to strain a gut to compete with the world for anything, they can just print all the money they need, the rest of the world will have to work for U.S. dollars to buy oil. What's your hurry?
And Russia will lead the world in railroad shipping in the mid 20th century unless we something NOW (int the early 1900s) to lay down as much railroad infrastructure as we can. It doesn't matter than we must produce a 2nd class of citizens living in indentured servitude as they lay down these rails along our West Coast. They are just Chinamen. We need to realize the urgency of creating this essential infrastructure or we'll be overwhelmed from the west. Oh, wait, duh. Wrong century. I mean Internet... not railroad... oh, and those garlic eating Eastern Europeans and the curry-smelling Indians... THEY must be made into an indentured servant class to protect our vital national interests. Hmm... so how do we create indentured servitude without calling it "indentured servitude"?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If all the US tech companies are interested in hiring are people from other countries on H1Bs, then of course the science in those countries will surpass the US.
The U.S. have very little in the way of modern electronic digital devices that are modern they are still pushing the same 1990s technology. Nobody knows of U.S. televisions. Nobody would dream of purchasing a U.S. computer. All the small devices are all made in Japan, China. They may not like to hear this in the U.S. but U.S. products as always been famous for being flimsy oversized rubbish. And IBM has been a charity case for many years and if it was left to its fate it would have closed down a long time ago. The U.S. is lost in the 1990s. All that said and done the U.K. is no better it makes chemicals and cardboard boxes and I cannot think of anything digital that is a global U.K. product. The PC is considered oldtime it is so old it doesn't recognise its own components without software. I have seen a U.S. product in Europe once but it was not a digital device it was a fridge freezer and it was massive. I have heard of people in Deutschland buying U.S. jukeboxes from the 1950s and 60s for furniture showpieces. The world is changing so fast so rapidly I think in 10 years time it will all be China China China. I don't know what the U.S. is any more I think it used to be Coca-Cola and apple pie? or is that just feature films?
I keep hearing some people telling me the U.S. is getting smarter, but all I see around me is people getting dumber, less educated, less skilled, less innovative, more lazy (and fatter, weaker, and more diseased in various ways goes along with that), more superstitious (anti-vaccination, leaning more towards religion and other 'spiritual' clap-trap), more a consumer-of-things than a producer-of-things, and overall less competitive with the rest of the 1st-world countries. We're even promoting a culture of non-competitiveness with our kids (not keeping score in team sports, 'everybody wins' mentality, discouraging criticism regardless of whether it's constructive or not). Then corporate America complains about there not being enough skilled workers who are U.S. citizens, so they hire a bunch of H1B workers who will take less pay anyway just to have a job, disincentivizing U.S. citizens to even bother trying to catch up. We're fucking up and it's our own damn fault.
"Former Cisco CEO John Chambers says the US is the only major country without a proper digital agenda "
That's simply plain wrong.
The USA has a well defined digital agenda it goes by, whatever the collateral problems this generates.
And this agenda is contained in a simple sentence :
"We Try To Collect Everything And Hang On To It Forever"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
aaaaaaa
I wonder what's Cisco's digital agenda for staying in the game after destroying its innovation capabilities in search of myopic profit-driven labor cost reductions... Blind replacements of U.S labor by that of the labor in the countries listed that are supposedly leading.. How's that working out?
Cisco : Partnerships/Acquisitions/Spin-ins and outs because we destroyed/laid-off/overlooked talent/innovation internally...
Article reads as : Chambers lamenting on the legacy he left behind : A once innovative company undone by myopic greed.
If only there was a labor/corporate agenda headed by the U.S govt. to save CEO's like John Chambers from themselves.... Oh' wait... John Chambers and CEOs like him lobbied and paid them to look the other way....
Bombs away! Because MURICA NUMBAH ONE when we kill everybody else!
The US is so corrupt, companies are buying monopolies everywhere, so they don't have to compete.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
The government is pretty much run exclusively by feminists and tortoises nowadays, so are you somehow surprised?
Meh. What a worthless piece of writing. The article doesn't even specify what a "digital agenda" is or give examples, but I guess I can use my imagination. You wanna know why all those countries have digital agendas? It's because they feel like they are light-years behind the US (silicon valley that is to say) and it's their way of acting like they are doing something about it..."Hey! We have an agenda! We're doing something here! Innovate!". The great irony of course being that you can't legislate your way to innovation with a Maoist 5 year plan. Tech innovation in the US is obviously doing just fine without some BS government lip service agenda...and we already have enough fucking corporate welfare programs thank you very much.
Instead of exporting work to every hellhole in the world, perhaps one would do well to repeal all immigration laws enacted in the last 70 years.
That would go far in removing the distortionary forces that oppose citizens.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
O perhaps you're smart enough to use exponential to describe a situation where the rate of change of something is proportional to that thing, rather than treating it as the linguistic equivalent of parmesan cheese and balsamic vinegar.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do we need a "digital agenda" in the USA when we already have all the tech in the world? What would having a "digital agenda" accomplish beyond what Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Twitter, and all the others have already done?
Watch your wallets. Beware of democRATS calling for action.
Right now we have distracted ourselves with a non-functioning congress and infighting over too many other things. Also, as a whole, we spent more time spending too much money outside our own budgetary means. There isn't much money left to create a "digital agenda" these days. Fix congress and balance the federal budget while paying back national debt and then I'll say we're ready to create a "digital agenda". The other side of this is that I was reading a post in here about the US being a "mainstay" in technology and large, traditional American technology companies were mentioned. That's fine but ignores the fact that what was being referred to in the article was about startups. If we fall behind on innovating and creating new technologies then we will fall behind. There is a lot of venture capital in the US at the moment. That is good but how do the policies of these other nations give them a leg up on creating and establishing new startups?
The US is going to give away all its jobs via H1B visas to Chinese and Indian citizens, who, thanks to people fearing immigration for anyone but poor Hispanics--give them citizenship for being here illegally but don't do anything for the mounds of educated international students--will be forced to return to their countries whether they like it or not. What do you think they are going to do with what they learned here?
The guy who is ran Cisco into the ground by off shoring and heavy H1B hiring is complaining about the US falling behind other countries? Really? Does he mean shareholder value? In my opinion this guy and others like him are a big part of the problem. If all the good jobs are being handed away because companies want to save money, then there is no incentive to pursue those jobs by folks who need to make a decent living in this economy. The only agenda he is speaking of is shareholder profits.
Stupid government picking winners and losers...If the US loses to those pinkocommiefascist countries its because we didn't give industry enough breathing room to compete! We need to abolish the tax code and all but the second amendment to the constitution or we risk losing it all! Its what the founding fathers would have wanted. #JadeHelm
Blame this on the ISPs that drag their feet on getting real data speeds to their customers. South Korea gets GIGABYTES to their customers at a price the US hasn't seen in years if ever. I'ts CHEAP!
In movies are total dorks, so of course the public doesn't care about IT stuff. 100 million SSN's later they still don't care.
Let's get more Americans in IT jobs, so that we aren't dependent on people from other countries. What's one big barrier to that? Lack of entry-level jobs for Americans.
If all entry-level programming jobs go to non-Americans, Americans won't get their foot in the door and get some experience. So who will the jobs go to, which require some experience? Non-Americans. If a company needs experienced programmers, it will be forced to hire non-Americans, because only non-Americans will have experience.
There should be financial incentives for a company to hire entry-level programmers who are American citizens.