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To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (18548)	4/17/1998 3:53:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

>>#1) We can indeed predict something about what other inventions might have been made without the government intervention in science and engineering of the 1940s to 1960s. Maybe we can, but you didn't.<<< Let me try again. Without all the people heavily trained by the government in science, math and technology in the 50's and 60's in a way not seen before or since, this latter technology revolution would not have happened. You say there would have been alternative inventions. I say there would have been a good deal less of it. That's an answer. I'm saying the money was well spent. I'm also saying that we may be in a declining stage of it, because the boomers are going to retire soon, and the next generation hasn't had the same training in math and hard science. To prevent that, the government needs to act again. Meanwhile, the difficulty of the SAT test has declined 250-350 score points, and most colleges now give bachelor degrees based on knowledge that used to get you through high school or maybe the first year of technical school or community college. This is not the foundation from which a new fundamental engineering revolution will spring. From my point of view, things have slowed way down already. The exception being biotech, where the government has placed most of it's new bets for quite a while. That is the obvious-to-everyone hot growth area for quite a while to come, mostly curtesy of the NIH and related agencies picking winners every day. Entrepreneurs and companies are too self-interested to take the broad long view required for this kind of intervention, generally speaking. >>>What are your ideas, and why are your ideas superior to mine?<<< Hmmm, not like you to miss the point. I noted that tech companies have to have products that give them a foundation. Also, the broken up companies will make more money if each has at least one proprietary successful product allocated to it, rather than all of them having by definition me-too products which they would have to compete on price with. These companies are not going to be resellers. They need their own products, not something that lots of other people are going to be selling also. Brands have value. If you own a brand, you can position it, you can leverage it into new products, you may have a profitable and reliable upgrade market for it (in software or cars, for that matter.) Give all these companies all the same ownership of all the products, and what happens? Each company has the same costs as before. Now you have multiplied the costs by lets say 5, total for the companies. Next, you say they can all add to this technology base. Lets say you have a core developer group for each product. I guess you would split them up and give individual members to different companies. Because in software, half the useful knowledge about how something works and where you can go with it next is in the developers heads. So which company gets the lead designer, who gets the code maven, and who gets the QA person? How do you get the employees to go for such a scheme? Some of the companies find themselves with no engineering capability to back up their product. OK, marketing. Each company still has, lets say, 60 products. I don't actually know how many MSFT has. but one thing for sure is each company now has marketing costs for all of the products in the line. Yet only 1/5 the former market. A formula for going broke. How about office space? 5 competitors in technology share the Redmond campus? Which company gets the campus? One that is structured in such a way that after the others move away, it can rent the empty space to former competitors that now want to be close to it. The OS company, renting to a few hundred small to medium software companies writing apps for windows, maybe. Including small cadres left from the other breakup companies still doing applications. God knows the media company would find that a difficult location. Finally, what about the corporate assets that aren't software products. Especially the media. do they all own 1/5 of msnbc? Wouldn't that make them essentially the same company? Of course. So, one company has to get the media, or some logical part of it. Compensation has to be made. Et Cetera. >>>Chaz, I wasn't trying to hit a raw nerve with you, really. But from your response, it certainly looks like I did.<<< No. I thought all of this would be completely obvious to all of you. What you are hearing is my astonishment that that is not the case. Am I the only one here that has cold-called a customer, made up a budget, hired a developer, read a marketing book? This is how software businesses have to work, guys. Of course media is completely different. That's why that is also a separate company. Cheers, Chaz