Well, I worked for a number of years in a DARPA/ARPA/WhateverFedGrantYouCanGet funded tech company. I can tell you right now that there is a whole cottage industry of companies that exist only to gobble up these grants, and NEVER endeavor to produce actual salable product.
They don't just care less if the product is a success in the marketplace or not, they don't want to take the effort and risk of selling and supporting the technology. It would distract them from writing another grant proposal - which to them is a guaranteed source of income.
Do they care that they promised the government that the goal was to jump start a commercial technology market for the betterment of the country? Heck no!
Does the government care that these companies never fulfill their promise to start a commercial company based around the technology they're underwriting? Heck No! It isn't their hard earned money - why should they care!!!
As you might tell, I'm rather bitter about the whole experience. There was a lot of mental firepower - my own included - being drawn to these sham government contract companies. The country would have been better served if these people went to VC or a bank or their family for funding - the need to pay investors back would have driven them to actually produce usable product.
I agree that what you say is true, especially with respect to companies that derive most of their research dollars from government contracts. But in the early ninties, there was an effort to get more of an interaction between ARPA and the research labs of mainstream industrial and service companies. Now I think all the funding goes to military tech companies and beltway bandits.
Research is a pipeline, and there are three distinct stages in the pipe:
(Mikenola)And yet all the really cool stuff still seems to come from this country , doesn't it?
No. You need to get out more.
The Soviet Union produced many more highly skilled engineers, and PhDs per capita than America, yet not one significant techological advance came from them.
They (now Russia) the world leader right now in supercapacitors, which are already replacing batteries for large industrial applications, including hybrid vehicles. The Russians have great mathematicians and engineers -- and now that the government is no longer standing on their throats, they're innovating beautifully.
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.
All past tense. What made that creativity and dynamism possible was a full research pipeline. The first two stages of the pipeline are now nearly empty from years of lack of investment.
Let the Chinas and Taiwans mass produce the small electronics; we don't need to.
I guess we don't need jobs for Joe Average who only finished high school then, correct? A healthy economy needs jobs for all skill levels, not just the top.
Their cultures are just not conducive to coming up with ideas like Google, Ebay, Dell, Microsoft, Walmart, Yahoo, etc.
Every single company on your list is the product of research that happened during the Reagan research boom years of the 1980s. None of them do basic science, only Microsoft does applied research (and then only a small amount), and that's it. You're looking at the past.
As long as America has the lions share of new ideas, our economy will still be on top.
This is true, but so is the converse: If we do not innovate, we're sunk. And that's what's been happening since 2001. What passes for "innovation" these days is pitiful in comparison to the technical innovation in the 1980s and 1990s, which was in turn fed by a 3-5 year long pipeline of basic, applied and engineering research. Even if we start funding things today, it will be at least a half decade before US technology innovation will be strong enough to expand the US economy again. And, to wrap it back to the thread, the current generation of non-investing CEOs are directly to blame.