[Dat Mon]

This article is right on the money...it epitomizes just ONE thing wrong with the technology industry in this country, and highlights why Long TERM technology trends are what is important.

Carly's attitude in fact is symptomatic of the attitudes of many Harvard MBA trained types in management who lead technical companies and who don't themselves have a technical background...there seems to be an underlying animus, perhaps borne out of the realization that they cant do what their geeky engineering staff does.

The fact is that a technical career is no longer seen as a legitimate high paying profession by society as a whole, in contrast to the legal profession. Our failure to maintain parity in our educational system with the rest of the world in training future scientists and engineers is further proof of that.

American graduate schools have become the exclusive domain of people not born in this country, many of which now return after graduate school to their native countries to innovate. The recent trend, IMO, also shows more and more cutting edge IEEE papers coming out of foreign university research programs.

You can also blame high tech guest worker bills which have destroyed the free market labor supply and demand for native American technical people.

You can also blame our tax and regulatory systems. Anyone price liability insurance lately? Our legal system is making it very very hard for the small Wozniak - Jobs garage shop Apple computer model to be replicated.

All told...large American leading edge tech companies are increasingly migrating high tech design facilities to Ireland, Scotland, India, Israel...as well as the ubiquitous China.

And all we are told in response to this by financial, political, and legal types is that all is well...

[cloud8]

> Carly's attitude in fact is symptomatic of the attitudes of many Harvard MBA trained types in management who lead technical companies and who don't themselves have a technical background...

Tell me about it! The B-school clown to whom our company was entrusted boasted, boasted that he hadn't written any code in 10 years, and that he wasn't about to learn about ours. The company went under within 10 months.

Women *can* make effective CEOs. Martha Stewart, for example (passing over the recent unpleasantness). Carly just wasn't one of them.

[mikenola]

All told...large American leading edge tech companies are increasingly migrating high tech design facilities to Ireland, Scotland, India, Israel...as well as the ubiquitous China.

And yet all the really cool stuff still seems to come from this country , doesn't it?

The Soviet Union produced many more highly skilled engineers, and PhDs per capita than America, yet not one significant techological advance came from them. Why?

America's strength is our creativity and dynamism. It's not about who manufactures the microchips anymore. It's about who makes those microchips do new and interesting things.

None of America's apparent competitors can even come close to us in the rate of new ideas. That's something that's difficult to quantify in things like the number of engineering students, etc.

Let the Chinas and Taiwans mass produce the small electronics; we don't need to. Their cultures are just not conducive to coming up with ideas like Google, Ebay, Dell, Microsoft, Walmart, Yahoo, etc.

As long as America has the lions share of new ideas, our economy will still be on top.