BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - Does the private sector create wealth anymore?

bpuharic

On Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:27:54 -0500, wrote:

On Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:17:59 -0500, bpuharic wrote:

i dunno that there is. i used to work for bell labs. they don't exist
any more. i used to work for texas instruments. they laid off all
their researchers and decided to buy what they need from the chinese.

The breakup of Ma Bell was probably the biggest advance for innovation
in the history of the country

disputable. what other company, besides IBM, has won as many nobel
prizes?

.. Bell Labs invented a lot of good stuff
but the marketing model of Ma Bell made sure that there was not much
money made by anyone but Ma Bell

and now most computer chips are made overseas...along with the
technology to develop these

.. We wouldn't have a real PC/Internet
business if you needed to rent your modem from Ma and only got the
speeds they thought you needed.

now THAT may be true. but the business model hasn't died. most of the
'baby bells' have consolidated back to big companies that rivaled the
old ATT

They had lots of money tied up in old
"plant" and they had little interest in making that stuff obsolete.
All you have to do is look at the innovation we got from the end of
WWII until they were broken up. We got phones in a color other than
black, touch tone and a phone with a light in it. AT&T had a lot of
technology but management chose to sit on it. If you talked to their
management at the time they would say it was because of government
regulation.

i used to travel to europe in the 80's and 90's. our phone system
wasn't that bad compared to many other countries.

IBM suffered from the same problems but they "unbundled" themselves
and you see what happened to the PC business. This was because they
opted to sell "open architecture" machines as opposed to the way the
mainframe business and Apple did business. They did screw up by not
being more aggressive in the home PC arena but they managed the office
environment in a way that allowed them to survive.

yep. IBM embraced competition in a way that apple did not. i remember
when apple and IBM both had about equal market share. not that way
today