

Monopoly allows innovation to flourish - dstowell
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/monopoly-allows-innovation-to-flourish.php

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yardie
What the author is really trying to say is government funding of advanced
technologies leads to innovations. He bases his arguments on the monopolies
that existed at the time but correlation =/= causation. Everyone of the
examples he sites had a huge amount of input from government funding. Bell
Labs wasn't going to create UNIX on its own. ARPA funded Bell Labs developed
UNIX. DOD invested money to get planes built, rockets built, and men on the
moon. And once we beat the CCCP to the moon all that funding was dialed down.

He might as well be saying the lack of a competing super power is why
innovation has stagnated. When I was in university there were a lot of ex
aerospace engineers taking university lecturer positions (not even
professorships, just teaching statics and mechanics). In fact there was a
joke, which was irrelevant until the recent economic crisis, about the only
job aerospace majors could get came with fries.

The stranglehold Microsoft had on the browser market brought new innovation at
all. It was 3-4 years of IE sux (6). And now that Firefox has gone through 3
major visions it finally lit the fire under Microsoft's ass. The same thing
for the iPhone. Windows Mobile...asleep at the wheel, Blackberry OS...asleep
at the wheel, Symbian...still trying to get their act together. All of a
sudden one maker makes a usable smartphone now everyone has a real browser,
multitouch, and honest to goodness intelligently designed UIs.

This article is a bag of FAIL.

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10ren
A text search of ARPA on the wikipedia article for Bell Labs didn't find a
match. Can you cite any evidence that ARPA funded Bell Labs?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Origin_and_historical...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Origin_and_historical_locations)

The most famously innovative labs (PARC labs) was funded by a monopoly
(Xerox).

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rfreytag
Famously innovative does not to me imply most innovative. The article
certainly did not make the case. The link at the bottom gives evidence to lead
one away from your conclusion.

All a monopoly gets you is to have the innovation under one roof. Radio is a
fine example of what happens when you have real competition instead of patents
driving innovation. Instead of AT&T's multi-decade stagnation we had extremely
rapid advance in technology in 20 years.

Of course we really can't rewind the clock, eliminate the monopoly/gov't
funding and see how things might of panned out. You might enjoy Terence Kealey
on this topic: <http://vimeo.com/4798314>

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pg
There's so much wrong with this article. The original data is some random
journalist's list of big innovations. And even if innovation was greater
during times of high defense spending, it wasn't greater because of
_monopolies._ A lot of the novel technology of the cold war was developed by
little companies.

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10ren
That's interesting, could you give some examples please?

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roc
Pure research definitely leads to innovation. But I don't think there's any
significant correlation between holding a monopoly and running a top-tier lab.

It has happened, sure. But at least as often, it hasn't. And a monopoly
certainly isn't required to build a great research lab.

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troystribling
I consider the graph of "Time Distribution of 100 recent major inventions" as
evidence of a decrease in the rate of innovation highly questionable and
subjective. To see an innovation as major will clearly take time since it will
need to be exploited. It follows that it is unlikely that anything recent
would be considered a major. Even as late as the early 90's I doubt that
e-mail would have been considered a major innovation and that was 20 years
after it was developed.

During the 80's through current day innovation drought just off the top of my
head I come up with the following: Scanning Tunneling Microscope followed by
the Atomic Force Microscope, Super String Theory, RNA Interference, Carbon
Nanotubes, iPhone (a convergence of many technologies in chip development and
manufacturing, power storage, display technology and software), Statistical
Natural Language Processing, Acceleration of Universe expansion, ....

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jerf
The flip side of a major innovation is an entire category that was previously
undiscovered or unutilized. Therefore, there are a finite number of
breakthroughs that are possible, and how many there are is determined by two
things: The nature of the universe, and _how we characterize breakthroughs_.

If you characterize "innovation" very broadly, then you get few innovations
that are even possible. Example: Would "augmented reality" be an "innovation",
or simply an application of existing vision algorithms, 3D graphics hardware,
and small computers? It's arguable either way, and I'm not making a claim
either way. My point is that if you do say "That's not an innovation, it's an
incremental improvement on the computer innovation", then you get a smaller
set of possible innovations to draw from. Apply that standard across the
entire set and you can shrink it to the point that there are only a handful
even _left_ (human-level AI, brain upload, space colonies, and maybe 10 or 20
more).

On the other hand, if you broaden the definition of "innovation", you get
more. Is a "web search engine" a valuable innovation? It's "just" an
application of a computer, but it's a big and important one. That "computer"
innovation is a particularly big source of this problem; there are many
innovation-class things that are "just" an application of a computer.

I don't think we've gotten that much less innovative. We're just taking some
time to come to grips with the ones we've already got, and research on others
is proceeding. I think this is an artifact of the way innovations get less and
less flashy over time; "cure for cancer" have been very innovative, but there
isn't just one, and individually they don't look like much. But they are,
nevertheless, proceeding, and at an increasing pace as we bring more and more
biology under our control.

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lallysingh
I agree with most here that a monopoly isn't required by any means, but there
is the issue of critical mass. I believe there's a nonlinear relationship
between the size of the lab and the significance of its output. The sheer size
(in dollars and brainpower) of Bell Labs and DoD-derived research were major
drivers in their successes.

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johnnybgoode
We're veering dangerously close to the broken window fallacy here...

