From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Dec 05 1999 - 12:40:31 MST
On Sun, 5 Dec 1999, Robert Owen wrote:
> > It Appears that once upon a time :
> >
> > > > rowen@technologist.com writes:
> > > >
> > > >if the "free market" really worked it would be innovative;
>
I've snipped a lot of discussion on this and thought I would
put some spin on from my perspective.
Lets take an example from the recent Scientific American special
publication I previously mentioned. In the article about
getting to petaflops computing, they mention the Grape computers
(that I mentioned at Extro 3) that were the first to obtain
teraflop computations. Now these were assembled by a small
research group in Japan for a very special purpose. They
also discussed the effort at Caltech being supported by the
DOD/DOE and probably some other agencies we don't want to name
to get to a petaflops by 2007, this is a very large effort
that is going to require the invention of a lot of stuff that
doesn't exist yet. Mentioned in passing that is the fact IBM has
looked at the problem of a special architecture Protein-Folding
computer (like the Grape but doing a different calculation).
They believe it would only cost a few million dollars but
but they say nothing about plans to develop such a machine.
I question whether an open and free market would have any
influence on the rate of development of any of these things
(all of which involve large amounts of innovation). We are
getting innovation in these areas because people want to solve
a problem are are able to swing the application of the resources
required to develop the solutions (i.e. to do the innovation).
It seems to be the case that now (in contrast to a 100 years ago)
that the resources required to do world class innovation are much
greater than they used to be (with the possible exception of the
software industry). I think this is because we have moved out of
the realm where most innovation is done on human scales (i.e.
designing a chair) and into the realms where innovation requires
a fair amount of relatively expensive infrastructure (university labs,
X-ray & e-beam lithography machines, DNA sequencers, mass spectrometers,
etc.) and most people simply do not have access to such resources.
I can easily innovate if it requires a hammer and nails, less easily
(but still doable) if it requires a milling machine and not at all
if it requires radioactive Gandolinium. Most of the hammer & nail
and much of the milling machine innovation has been done already.
The shift you see in innovation from individuals to organizations
is, I believe, due to the fact that the problems we are dealing with
have simply gotten harder and require more resources. People who
are in those privileged positions where they have access to the
required resources are by and large pretty innovative (IBM for
example has been amazing the last few years). The connection
between innovation and "free markets" in my mind is pretty slim.
I can even make the case that the free market for and declining costs
of general purpose microprocessors are stifling innovation because
companies see no point to putting resources into exploring novel
architectures because there is no market for them. I can only
think of a single computer company (Tera) that has anything really
innovative in state-of-the-art in computer architectures in the
last decade.
Robert
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