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."

Comments

Something tells me...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Something tells me...

[bondsbw]

This article, published on a UK site but lamenting US policy, fails to explain anything at all. It uses the words "digital" and "digitise" as vague terms to describe computing technology.

To say that the US has no computing technology policy is ludicrous, considering the US built much of the policy that has been applied in countries around the world, so it would be helpful if the article can provide at least one example of what is deficient in the US. But that appears to be too much to ask.

Useless

[Clsid]

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.

Re:Useless

[Dutch Gun]

I agree that this reads like nonsense - pure corporate-speak.

“Traditional companies in this industry think linear,” he argued. “You’ve got to think exponentially. You’ve got to reinvent yourself as a leader, your organisation structure and a company.

This is about the former Cisco CEO talking about himself and how brilliant a leader he is. I read through the entire article, and didn't get a clue as to what role the government should actually have, at least in specifics. Perhaps I'm not smart enough to think exponentially like him, so I might have missed it.

And what, pray tell, is a "digital agenda"?

[Sycraft-fu]

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?

It's what we "do"

[Tablizer]

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.

So the government is cutting edge?

[Tony Isaac]

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?

aha

[superwiz]

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"?

It literally makes my blood boil.

[Hognoxious]

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.