"American IT is far ahead of the rest of the world..."
Don't tempt me :-) This statement is very black/white, and definitely contradicts my perception. While I agree that you have some very large IT systems based on technologies from the 1970s (MUMPS?!?), a good share of the world's fastest computers, Microsoft etc., there are also many things that USA doesn't have.
I could mention various kinds of IT businesses where USA is behind, but I guess the most famous misjudgement of the status of American IT was done by Microsoft, who bought a Danish Business software company in order to get into the European market, and bought Great Plains in order to get into the U.S. market. They assumed that Great Plains was ahead, so the plan was to market Great Plains software in both places. After a while, they figured out that the Danish software was significantly superior, and then changed their opinion, and now markets the Danish software in USA, too. This non-U.S. software is called Microsoft Dynamics today. I could tell you similar stories about IBM and CSC in health care IT, and I would be surprised if Boeing is much more advanced than Volkswagen or EADS. Remember that EADS introduced fly-by-wire before Boeing. SAP is also German.
Besides software producers, software vendors and software installations, there is the question of market penetration and use statistics. USA is late on several technologies and usage patterns, and for instance, many advanced phone never make it to the U.S. market - maybe because of usage patterns, maybe because the U.S. mobile coverage is so poor. Even in New York, you may lose coverage in the subway or inside the Rockefeller building, whereas I have no idea where in northwest Europe I should go in order to lose coverage, maybe a mine or something like that. I see many U.S. IT systems that are basically electronic paper, where you did not move to an IT-based paradigm, yet. Afaik, this is one reason why Great Plains lost to Navision, but in health care IT, this seems to be the case, too. Just the idea of having a "CPOE" system seems extremely outdated, today. |
