noteworthy wrote:
] If I were an IBM board member, or anyone who cared about
] the long-term health of IBM or the US technology industry or
] the whole blooming US economy, I'd be unspeakably
] depressed.
]
] Know this for sure: Some company will build all this and more
] into a radically more powerful, radically simpler PC. Will it
] be an American company? Don't count on it.

I guess I violated the point of this blog by actually reading this article. Its silly. Everything this person asks for is software, which has nothing at all to do with selling PCs (and a lot of what this person asks for is incredibly naive).

There is little room for innovation in the PC market. These are standardized goods. Some companies are in it just because it generates a lot of revenue, at volume, but its not central to IBM's business. Its possible to make PCs poorly, and IBM does it well, but in their history they have tried several times to innovate in this market and they have failed consistently, because this market is about standardization and innovation makes you incompatible.

Outsourcing PC making to China is no more a threat to American competitiveness then the outsourcing of the manufacture of the components within, which has already moved to Asia.

The competitive markets in the PC world are media PCs, which are tied up by intellectual property issues and will most likely be dominated by consumer electronics firms, and mobile devices, which are also far removed from IBM's business. Both markets have significant American players, but neither is lead domestically.

A more significant threat to domestic leadership in technology comes from our technology adoption rate. Europeans and Japanese make good cellphones because people in those places buy them up more rapidly then we do. Japanese and Koreans are going to make more interesting internet media technologies because they have more bandwidth at home. On the other hand, we're going to do VOIP, because our vast country has a more immediate need for it.

On the whole, we're clearly going to pass the point where American know how gives us a technological edge. We're entering a period where the unique cultural identities of a nation impact the technologies they create. I don't think any one country is suited to dominate this. You can do some things with policy and funding to drive things, but only to an extent. Accidents of geography and perspective will have much greater effects.

RE: How to Build a Better PC, by David Gelernter