4 ms·
"Things that only take 7 or so years to develop just cannot be that hard to do." Interesting perspective. I know a company that just completed the development
by jes 13y ago
"Things that only take 7 or so years to develop just cannot be that hard to do."
Interesting perspective.
I know a company that just completed the development of a new ultrasound system. The system, when deployed, will benefit hundreds of thousands of people around the world. And it was built by a for-profit corporation.
Building that system took about four years. That's four years of 150+ individuals working directly on its design and realization. That means writing code, doing industrial design, laying out PCBs with 20+ layers and thousands of components, working out soldering processes via electron microscopy, ensuring regulatory requirements such as IEC 60601 3rd Edition are met, managing complex schedules, debugging extremely difficult problems, etc.
Now, go even one level deeper and think about the tens or hundreds of thousands of people involved in developing the components and systems used to build this new ultrasound system. How about the software used to design ASICs? Systems on a chip, like the TI DaVinci series? And what of the businessman that starts a reliability lab so customers can get dye and pry services to analyze BGA soldering problems?
Is this the kind of innovation that you choose to label so derisively?
- confluence 13y agoYes. They helped reduce the cost and increase the performance of a well understood system with a variety of incremental innovations. Well done. I hope that company goes on to make a lot of money from the spread of their reduced costs, and those of the costs borne by the grateful public. But they didn't develop ultrasound. Governments funding massive universities and militaries did.
- fpgeek 13y agoAlso governments funding space programs...
- hearty770 13y ago...funded by profits generated from the private sector?
- acjohnson55 13y ago...a private sector built on technological innovations whose initial development was funded by the government. See what I did there? It's not a question of "who's better, public or private industry?" We need to recognize that our system is built on a symbiosis of both.
- hearty770 13y agoAnd where did governments get the funding for those investments?
- Kell 13y agoI think it's what he is saying. Govs take money from the private sector to develop long term things, that the private sector won't have the leverage and the pockets to do, but the aggregate of a whole nation can. What OP is saying is that we need both. States to do basic and fundamental long term research. And applied, short term, cost reducing research, to give what the gov helped discover to the public at large.