🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <13881@dime.cs.umass.edu> yodaiken@freal.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken) writes:

   From: yodaiken@freal.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken)
   In article <202@csinc.UUCP> rpeglar@csinc.UUCP (Rob Peglar) writes:
   >In article <253@garth.UUCP>, fouts@bozeman.ingr.com (Martin Fouts) writes:
   >> The trick is to do the R&D cheaply enough or fast enough that the
   >> product has a long enough market life time to recover costs and make
   >> money.  If you can't do that, you shouldn't be in business.
   >
   >True.  The point is to let the market, not the bankers, decide.
   >-- 

   My bad experience with a start-up fold-down did not lead me to great
   confidence in the market either. Investors seem interested in quick
   profits, and too technically ignorant to make good decisions. 

   Tranistors were a poor draw in the
   market until many years of DOD funding developed both the technology
   and the applications to a point where manufacturing became cheaper.
   Note the niether the Japanese nor the Europeans are willing to wait for
   markets to be developed and controlled by someone else before getting into
   a field. They are quite happy to let the government force and entice
   corporations into areas that they think are good for the nation --profitable
   or not.

According to a book on Bell Labs that I have been reading lately this
is another urban myth.  Acording to the book, DOD did very little to fund
transistor work.  There were two problems with marketing transistors.
One was reliability and the other was acceptance.  Once the
reliability problems were solved, A major effort was needed to
convince engineers to design with transistors, and to find products
where they were truely useful...

In fact, on careful investigation, one can find very little technology
developed as a result of government research which actually achieved
commercial acceptance.  I've been trying for enough years that I now
assert that no US government funding has had sufficient impact on a
consumer technology to pay for itself, or introduce a significant
impact on the market.

Before you all flame me about the early history of computers, go back
and carefully compare the relationship of the the military projects
like eniac to the commercial work done by companies like sperry and
ncr.  You will be surprised at how little impact removing the
government from the computer industry would have really had.

BTW, the big win for transistors was cheap pocket radios.  Twenty
years later the big win for ICs was cheap radios.  US industry missed
both of these obvious markets.

--
Martin Fouts

 UUCP:  ...!pyramid!garth!fouts  ARPA:  apd!fouts@ingr.com
PHONE:  (415) 852-2310            FAX:  (415) 856-9224
 MAIL:  2400 Geng Road, Palo Alto, CA, 94303

If you can find an opinion in my posting, please let me know.
I don't have opinions, only misconceptions.