The Death of Innovation

Carly's Way:

New technology typically has a five-year development cycle. The U.S. technology business stopped being serious about research in 2000 and the results are showing now.

People have a little more money but there's nothing they want to buy. There's nothing that makes you say, 'Wow.' Ten years ago I was seeing something interesting every month, but now we're touting bloated software and cute case designs as innovation.

I often used to say that we're still suffering the fall-out of the Y2K fiasco. I'm surprised to see that we still are, but this article makes a lot of sense.

After a fashion, I think the Y2K fear can be all but directly blamed on some very short-sighted engineers at Microsoft: it was their OSes, after all, exclusively almost, which were defective and showed a lack of understanding that the end of the millennium was coming. We all saw it, but their products didn't take it into account. It's good to be the king of the software business, but not so good when a blunder this mind-numblingly easy to figure out causes such a massive follow-on effect.

In short:

• There is a lack of innovation going on
• because companies killed their R&D budgets after Y2K
• because they had no money
• because people had to fix their computers
• because the Y2K bug would crash them otherwise
• at least the ones running Windows
• which was built by Microsoft
• poorly

In my opinion, the death of American R&D and innovation can be linked directly to a particularly laissez-faire attitude in the OS house of our favourite monopoly.

Isn't capitalism great?!?