To: arun gera who wrote (48180 ) 12/25/2005 11:39:52 PM From: Kailash Read Replies (1) | Respond to It's mixed. Cell phones are a huge market and while Motorola is a big player, the European GSM standard is winning out and Nokia and Sony Ericsson dominate the market worldwide. Microsoft still dominates the software industry -- so far only free software is a credible challenger, and that mainly on the operating system front (Europe, China, and Latin America is starting to switch). Aggregating Internet businesses are still US dominated (Yahoo, Google), but VOIP is not -- Skype is Estonian. Infrastructure growth at the macro level is dominated by the US, but the "last mile" is far better in many other places (Korea, Japan, Scandinavia), HDTV adoption is far more advanced in Europe. We've had peace for so long that a lot of economies have fully recovered; the US advantage was in large part due to the destruction the old world brought upon itself. Anything in computer-related hardware manufacturing is being taken over by the Chinese; software will increasingly be written outside of the US. I don't need to dwell on car manufacturing. The Europeans managed to break into the huge market of large commercial airliners that the US used to have a complete lock on; they also have a major satelite launching business. Several nations are now working on space projects. Some of the largest pharmaceutical companies are based in Switzerland and Sweden. According to official figures, the US turned a net importer of high technology around 2001. The US still leads in several areas and has the world's best university system by a long stretch, but there is no longer the sustained motivation to build the country as a long-term project. The flooding of New Orleans was handled no better than a third-world country. There's a lot of positive stuff still happening here and a lot of potential, but the US will have to get its act together if it's going to maintain a decent life for its citizens. It will never recover the dominant position it had at the end of WWII.
