Former Intel CEO Andy Grove Wants Struggling Industries To Stop Slacking 235
lousyd writes "Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and current instructor at Stanford Business School, has a message for industry. He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history. He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was. On the issue of computer patents, he insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: 'You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger.'"
use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much (Score:5, Insightful)
A "use em or lose'm" rule would be good for fixing the patent troll problem, but it would do nothing to prevent software companies from attacking free software [swpat.org] or from ruining standards [swpat.org].
So, what's the answer supposed to be? (Score:5, Insightful)
He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was.
Perhaps there would have been more supercomputers? Or the internet would have arrived sooner and networking would be more advanced? None of us know what would have happened. Assuming it would have been worse is just speculation.
O really! (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger
Beg [slashdot.org]
to [slashdot.org]
differ [slashdot.org],
twice [slashdot.org],
three times [slashdot.org] and maybe even
four [slashdot.org]!
Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be? (Score:4, Insightful)
He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was.
Perhaps there would have been more supercomputers? Or the internet would have arrived sooner and networking would be more advanced? None of us know what would have happened. Assuming it would have been worse is just speculation.
Given the history of such enterprises, learned speculation would tell it'd have to be worse... You are saying that since they didn't have a chance to screw that up, magically it would turn out to be their only success...
No thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
Government-free energy implies more coal power plants.
Few energy companies are interested in multi-billions long term investments in energy efficiency & renewables.
The path of least resistance is coal, which also happens to be the dirtiest solution.
I'm too lazy to do it... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm too lazy to do it, but I think if I looked hard enough, I'm pretty sure I'd find a giant heap of government subsidization in Intel's past. It might be disguised as tax breaks, favorable legislation, or some sweet no-bid contract deal, but I doubt many companies get to Intel's size without getting some help along the way from their friends in state and federal governments. They were just smart enough to get it done in a way that's a lot less visible than the "ZOMG I CAN HAZ BAILOUT" approach taken recently.
apples to oranges comparison (Score:2, Insightful)
People die because they can not get access to or afford health care, no so with Intel products.
Plus the U.S. Federal Gov requires that E.R.s treat those who can not pay*. Hey Andy, how about Intel give away CPUs, Chipsets, Motherboards and SSDs (w00t!) to those who can't afford 'em?
* So I've heard.
PS, no I did not read the article.
Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno, government funding of private enterprise has worked pretty spectacularly in the past. For example; the railroad system, The New Deal, WWII spending, interstate highways, aerospace technology, the Apollo missions, ARPANET, etc. And those are only a few examples from the US, ignoring other countries' initiatives.
Of course, there are plenty of spectacular failures too, but that's true of any human endeavor. But like I said, this is just speculation. Would we have had the internet at the time we did without government funding?
healthcare (Score:5, Insightful)
"Another business he believes to be ripe for disruption is health care. He complains that the industry seems to innovate much too slowly. The lack of proper electronic medical records and smart âoeclinical decision systemsâ bothers him, as does the slow-moving, bureaucratic nature of clinical trials. He thinks pharmaceutical firms should study the fast âoeknowledge turnsâ achieved by chipmakers, so that the cycles of learning and innovation are accelerated."
I don't think this guy understands how the healthcare industry works. We can implement a change with electronic medical records but when it comes to clinical trials and drug testing, it is not just bureaucracy that slows it down. The very nature of using human subjects as opposed to electronic devices means doing long and thorough testing, and we still don't have a complete picture of how everything fits together in the human body.
Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a pretty well known problem, and there's a very good reason why the assumption is valid. Innovating and coming up with new ideas is both hard and expensive. If you don't believe that government intervention of this sort kills progress, just look at the various Russian industries that have and are going nowhere.
Now look at industries in the US that have been messed with in a similar way by our government, surprisingly there isn't that much difference beyond what corruption explains. What you're arguing against is a pretty fundamental element in economics, and while I question a lot of ideas that economists have, this one has a lot of merit to it.
Re:"Relatively government free" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really the same thing.
Re:No thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
The path of least resistance is coal, which also happens to be the dirtiest solution.
This.
Except, not probably in the way that you think.
If we want to see the world use energy efficiency and renewables, then ideally we find a way to make them the path of least resistance.
Make it make cents, and suddenly it will make sense as well. It doesn't work in every case, but on the supply side of the equation it gets exponentially more important.
Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I really have a dog in this hunt but I think the comparison of colloquial English and computer communication protocols is an extremely poor one. Perhaps legal English would make for a better but still imperfect comparison... and that certainly has a long history of regulation, negotiation, contractual agreement.
massive government subsidies (Score:3, Insightful)
The computing industry has received massive government subsidies. The Internet, high performance computing, CPU architectures, compiler construction, and plenty more was financed by DARPA and other US government agencies, as well as European and Japanese government function. The subsidies were in the form of research grants, technology transfer from government research labs, among others. Knowledge and technologies were also massively transferred in the form of graduate students, academics, and government researchers coming into the private computing sector.
There's nothing wrong with--it's government doing what it should be doing. But if Andy Grove thinks computing did it all by itself, he's kidding himself.
If other sectors (automotive, energy, transportation, environment, etc.) are supposed to catch up, the government needs to invest massively in basic and applied research, fellowships, and government research labs in those areas.
Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be? (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>For example; the railroad system, The New Deal, WWII spending, interstate highways, aerospace technology, the Apollo missions, ARPANET, etc.
>>>
OMG. You call these successes? Let's see:
- railroads were funded *privately* not publicly. And now that rail has been taken-over by government, it's constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. Ditto the government-run post office.
- The New Deal was a major fuckup that extended the recession from 1929 to 1950. Contrast that with the 1921 recession when the government did nothing, and yes it was bad, but the economy quickly recovered in 1922.
- WW2 was a horror not a success.
- Most interstate highways (like I-76/I-80) are paved-over already existing State Turnpikes, which were *private* funded businesses. Their genesis lies in the spirit of entrepreneurship. Now that government has taken-over a lot of them are falling apart (see bridge collapses).
- Aerospace was born in the backyards of hobbyists with a vision, and brought to fruition by a military looking for weapons, which you're right - governments are very effective at waging war.
- ARPAnet is something for which government deserves credit, but after 1980 the government was intelligent enough to step aside and let private companies take over, and that's why these was an enormous boom (from 0.1 or 0.3 kbit/s speeds under the government-run stagnation to ~100,000 kbit/s speeds with competitive speedwars).
- Social Security has been a joke, because if you live long enough to get it, the "interest rate" earned on your original deposit is only 1%... below the inflation rate so effectively negative growth. If you don't live long enough to see retirement (a more common problem than many people realize), the money you get back is ZERO! ----- You'd be better-off having a simple savings account could be handed-off to your children if you die, rather than disappear forever. Plus you'd earn much much greater growth, than investing in the government's SS.
I'll stop here. I could go on-and-on-and-on about government failures, bankruptcies, misappropriation of funds, et cetera, but my hands hurt so I'll just stop here and let you absorb what you've heard.
Re:Read the article, (Score:2, Insightful)
You want an example? Look at alcohol. Look at the deaths resulting from the widespread legal use of said drug, and tell me with a straight face that the answer is to unleash big pharma to make and market more chemical toys to play with.
yes, of course, the answer to a small part of the population mishandling something is prohibition. what about education? and your answer specifically implies that alcohol should be banned. yeah right, good luck with that. people only accepted prohibition of psychoactive drugs because they had available drug options, as well as of course the highly effective brainwashing techniques used to demonise the terrible drugs of the time - back in those days cannabis was the drug the filthy peasants used and that's why they attacked it.
fact is that people are using the drugs (amazing but true) anyway. and not enlarging the options for people is not helping, because it's a case of the devil you know. like meth, sure, it's got a lotta downsides, i know from personal experience. but what alternative is there?
at some point society as a whole is gonna have to really re-evaluate this whole business because the mess the current situation has created is a RESULT of prohibition. not the existence of any given drug.
lets say that somehow magically prohibition worked and all the illegal drugs suddenly evaporated. nobody was using illegal drugs. don't you think they'd turn to legal ones? do you even comprehend how big the legal drug abuse problem is now? oxycontin, vicodin, suboxone, valium whatever you care to name. legal drugs are more used in the wrong way than illegal ones. people use drugs for a reason and focusing on their behaviour when they misuse them is missing the point entirely.
Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:AT&T and other monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention NASA. The market and private enterprise could never have put a man on the moon in 10 years. Government set the strategy and arranged for private companies to make it happen.
Note that the space program (and military) drove the creation of technology to create commercial integrated circuits. How convenient to forget the help that government provides after the fact.
Of course without that arrogance - perhaps he would never have become the effective manager that he once was.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Grove is ignoring history (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets not forget that IBM was involved in a massive, government funded, data processing project in Europe in the 1940s
On a less flippant note, the microprocessor was a direct product of the US nuclear missile program. Nobody was pushing for miniaturised computers until the government put billions into making it happen so they could fit a guidance computer on a missile.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/05/tob_minuteman_1/print.html
But that is the trick to being a good capitalist; rewrite history and claim you've never received any help from the government, and it was the 'genius of the market' which made you rich. Don't be afraid to wag your fingers at any other government subsidy though - because its all evil socialism!
Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much (Score:5, Insightful)
It would never work.
The patent system is broken. Patents are only supposed to be given to truly innovative work, not simple "evolutionary" changes (e.g. "the logical next step.") Thanks to "patent-slamming" (the practice of companies like IBM, Micro$oft, and others sending in thousands on thousands of patent filings per year on the theory that if even 1% gets through they can patent-troll those and block competition), the patent office is overworked. The overworked patent office, in turn, has been granting patents to all sorts of things that never, ever should have qualified.
A great example of this was Wizards of the Coast's "patent" on card game mechanics [uspto.gov], to wit "The method of claim 3, wherein said step of designating one or more of the cards comprises rotating the one or more cards on the playing surface from an original orientation to a second orientation", which under a proper analysis done by any COMPETENT and non-overworked patent attorney should have been invalidated by prior art by the collected works of one Edmund Hoyle [wikipedia.org] over two hundred years ago.
The patent playing field is broken and needs a re-set, with strong rules preventing things like patent-slamming from happening and getting back to the point where only true innovation is rewarded with a patent. Until that time, we're fucked.
Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be? (Score:3, Insightful)
I will be corrected if I am wrong. But isn't US postal service a non profit seeking organization, that sets it's service prices just to cover expenses? And when you don't target profit, you are by definition "on the verge of bankruptcy", so is any other 0 profit seeking entity.
Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be? (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet the United States of America emerged as the most wealthy and dominant power in the world AFTER WW1 and WW2. After those 2 wars everybody owed US a lot of money.
Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much (Score:5, Insightful)
With cheese (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me address the real issue here. Just because the US has poorly managed it's infrastructure does not mean the rest of the world has. Capitalist fanaticism is just as dumb as communist or anarchist fanaticism.
For instance, the whole of Europe is covered by subsidized rail. Europe uses less than 20% of the energy that we do for transportation. Who is more efficient? France has a nuclear powered high speed rail system that is ridiculously efficient, clean, and well used. Just because lobbyists are directing all our infrastructure to the dead idea of highways and urban sprawl doesn't mean that subsidized rail is a bad idea. It means that rail and sensible land use aren't receiving as much money as they should.
The best illustration of the failure of US governance can be seen quite plainly in healthcare. I don't care what anecdote you have. Statistically, the rest of the world pays at least 35% less than what we do for health care, they live just as long, and they are happier with their system than we are with ours. This is because they have grown up and realized that the market solution is not always the best.
Another example is telecommunications infrastructure. Across the whole of Europe, well regulated broadband has covered nearly every inch of the continent with low cost, high speed internet access. Even in countries with similar population densities, like Norway and Sweden and Finland. Sure, you can find complaints. Give them the choice of a government option or a closed option like Comcast or AT&T, and you'll quickly discover that people don't want to be locked into a vendor. It would be like Georgia Power (where I live) only allowing Georgia Power appliances to use electricity. The liberation of American network access, if it ever happens, will be with corporations fighting to the bitter end to keep their profit margins intact, built not on their own dime, but the infrastructure subsidized by you and me from programs throughout the 90s.
You've swallowed wholesale the lie that corporations are better than government for everything. Just take a look at the 1880s before public outcry ended child slavery, 70 hour workweeks, unsafe working conditions, and crippling manual labor. That's the reality of corporate governance. These deplorable conditions didn't disappear, they were just outsourced to countries where the leaders are willing to exploit their workforce for kickbacks.
You can advocate an intelligent position, where corporations are kept in check by a more powerful and localized government, and the local government is kept in check by a powerful participatory democracy. Or you can advocate for the madness of money being the only metric by which success can be measured. You could munch on a Baconator while the rest of the world continues to improve through science and collective innovation, and we become an echo chamber of reality shows and televangelists and Fox News anchors, trying to convince a nation literally dying from it's own selfishness and gluttony that they're still #1.
Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be? (Score:3, Insightful)
In any case, the purpose of social security was to provide a source of financial income to old people.
You sound like someone who really needs to get laid, or go into anger management courses, or both.
"The Government" - I would like to know which agency within "The Government" you are referring to. I would also like to know what government you are referring to. If you are in the US, you could be referring to the federal government, your state government, your county government, or your city government. And within "The Government" there are scores of different agencies, all responsible for different programs, initiatives, and regulations.
Perhaps giving a more clear example instead of your blanket "government sucks" line might make this more clear.
Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much (Score:4, Insightful)
Patents themselves are government intervention in the market.
Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much (Score:2, Insightful)
Patents (and copyright) are a way of giving market value to creative effort. Any "reform" of either that removes the absolute ability of the inventor (author) to control whom uses their IP removes said IP from the market, and instead makes it a form of government regulation.
What utter bullshit.
The purpose of patents is not to create or inflate
value.
Patents are ment to encourage disclosure without destroying value.
There's absolutely no reason for the patent holder to retain control if it's not necessary to his benefitting from the patent.
Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for the link to the Wright-Curtiss patent war of the early 20th century in aviation. There it states that because of that patent war, aviation did not progress as swiftly in the US as it did in Europe, so much so that when the US entered WWI, it had no competitive aircraft and was forced to use French ones!
This is a perfect illustration that in the wrong context, especially patent trolls, patents actively hinder progress.