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Your last words are ironic. Anyone writing on the subject at the time would have ended with "we're being left in the dust by Japan".
by PaulAJ 8y ago
Your last words are ironic. Anyone writing on the subject at the time would have ended with "we're being left in the dust by Japan".
- jdietrich 8y agoAt the time, we were. Japan were miles ahead in the semiconductor industry, which was the key part of the computer industry in the 70s. Both Britain and Japan squandered their competitive advantages in a remarkably short period of time; Britain failed to effectively commercialise a large base of skilled software developers, while Japan failed to pivot into software and saw their semiconductor industry become commodified into irrelevance. Technology changes on very short timescales. No advantage lasts for long, no matter how great that advantage might be. You have to keep investing, you have to keep experimenting, you have to be prepared to radically pivot, otherwise someone else will take advantage of your complacency and knock you out of the game.