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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (18336)	7/13/2010 1:05:18 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

This statement is very black/white, and definitely contradicts my perception. Your perception, then, is wrong. 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. No, there really aren't. Not in the IT field. I could mention various kinds of IT businesses where USA is behind Okay. How about you do that? You've mentioned several areas in which there are fundamental differences in the way business operates. But I doubt if you can come up with one where America lags, and as with medical technology, most information technology originated in America. but I guess the most famous misjudgement of the status of American IT was done by Microsoft, who bought a Danish Business software company Microsoft is not an example of American leadership. They have never been good innovators and have never represented the best America has to offer. The Great Plains purchase was stupid; it was lousy software to begin with and people were moving away from it, not to it by the time they took it over. If you want to find that in today's organizations you would look at Google and Apple, or historically, at Bell Labs and IBM. All businesses make mistakes -- and in IT, if you've done much design and development you know sometimes it is necessary to throw in the towel on a design and rebuild it. It happens. If you work near the IT business you work with American IT hardware and software daily. You are using an American gift to the world, the Internet, as you type. Yes, we have handed over a lot of jobs to foreign countries. But we continue to be the technology leader by a large margin. Hell, even the countries that produce CPUs steal the technology from the United States. Look at the storage technologies that are common today -- high density hard drives and flash -- American innovations. LEDs? CREE in the US. Flat panels? Corning basically came up with the technology to mass produce them. 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. Well, I can't speak to Boeing versus others today, but they were doing serious CAD/CAM when nobody else was even thinking about it. But I doubt one can seriously talk about aircraft technology without looking at the American B2 as an example of that leadership. If you want to giggle about MUMPs (and most assuredly, COBOL), that's fine -- I wouldn't choose those languages for anything I do today, either. But their longevity is likely a testament to their success. And, like practically every other major programming language (other than PASCAL), their roots are in American IT. The US is not "late" on cellphone technology; but it has evolved differently here for perfectly good reasons. In 1979, I worked on the project for mapping the original cellphone network in the US. At that time, nobody else had this technology. But in the US we have excellent hardwired infrastructure, whereas in many other countries cellphones is all there was. So, cellphones play a more crucial role in some countries versus the US. Still, the iPhone and Android are not to be overlooked. These are the tech leaders when you really get down to it (AAPL's temporary issues notwithstanding). If you want to talk about who builds the cheapest phones, that's a different thing -- it is unfortunate that America has this baggage of labor unions that has destroyed it manufacturing base, but definitely, other countries are killing us in that arena. I'm not trying to have a pissing contest here; we're all proud of our own country's accomplishments and hate their failures. While IT is no longer exclusively the domain of the US, we continue to innovate more than the rest of the world, combined. That's changing, and the pace of the change is speeding. But right now, I don't believe you will find significant information technologies in other countries that aren't here, and most of them, frankly, began here.