High Technology Quotes
Computers, robots have replaced many more American workers than those who lost their jobs by having them replaced by foreign labor. Ironically, even in counties like China, South Korea, and a number of others, have "liost" millions of jobs to automation thenselves.
Acronis successfully sells sophisticated software all over the world. Ironically, Russia had a plethora of brilliant, well trained scientists and engineers, most of whom could not find jobs in their field in Russia. Many emigrated to the United States, Israel, the UK, Canada, Germany and Australia. Only recently have Russian businessmen started technology companies.
This quotation illustrates on how even recent history can be perceived differently depending on one’s philosophy and world view. In America, we tend to minimize the government’s role in important innovation and great leaps forward. Many people from Communist or Socialist cultures, tend to minimize the role of private enterprise. For example in the case of the Internet, it is true that all the initial R&D was funded by DARPA, a unit of the Defense Department. And it is also true that the World Wide Web innovation and development was done and paid for by CERN a scientific consortium of European Governments. However, the total amount of those two government expenditures would not equal Microsoft’s R&D budget for 1 day. Most of the developmental capital came from the private sector and the people who did most of the innovative work were private sector employees. However, there would have been many years delay if the U. S. Government had not funded the first small but critical activity. The government sector provides a very large proportion of the sales income for Microsoft, Apple, Intel and the many other Silicon Valley firms, not with contracts for innovation but as buyers of their hardware and software. There are government contracts but those applications are specialized for the government and are a small fraction of the revenue received by Silicon Valley.
Reagan probably fully intended to share the technology but the Russian leader, and his advisors, did not believe that an American President was powerful enough to fulfill such a pledge in the face of opposition by the right wing members of Congress and the military industrial complex,
Many of the major new technology companies of America initially wanted nothing from government and didn’t want government to interfere with their efforts. They initially did no donate to political campaigns or hire lobbyists. But because of their amazing success, they transformed American and world society, threatened and damaged vested interests and became the focus of government attention. And soon the began to play the game but unlike their technologies at which there were masterful, they were not as skilled and adroit at politics. In a number of c cases they challenged the United States government both directly and indirectly by changing facts on the ground in America, and when government was most needed to work out new rules of the road for the nation with the new technologies, the U. S. Congress was gridlocked and totally dysfucntional.
