The conversation that Mark's postings generate is a fascinating study of assumptions and beliefs. Much ado about very little, but that little well and consistently stated. He actually hasn't said much, except that he has "something" and he will show his cards "soon". Meanwhile he has not asked for money from anyone on the Vortex list, so we have not bought a ticket to the show; we can only press our noses to the glass and whimper. We have only to wait, as many of us did with the SMOT (I ordered one; eventually the originator offered to repay all who did so, so in the end he was a self-deluded but honorable man).
The issue of innovation strategy as represented by Jed and Bill in one corner and Mark and Randy Mills in another is a study of the blind men and the elephant. Each has an aspect of the truth, but mistakes it for the whole truth. I choose the term 'innovation' carefully, for it implies both the invention and its implementation in transforming society. Patents, no matter how basic, expire. All patents do is give the inventor a head start. The history of photocopiers is a salient example. Xerox did hold the singular patent on the selenium coated photoconductive drum. For a long time there was no satisfactory substitute, and Xerox grew wealthy and complacent. Eventually photoconductive elastomers were developed and the Xerox patent became irrelevant about the time it expired. The Asians did a better job of manufacturing engineering and product design and nearly buried Xerox. Xerox PARC also had the essential elements of the personal computer GUI but the management, in its dignity, could not be associated with a "mouse", so Steve Jobs carried the GUI to Apple and to the screen you are now looking at. Any true energy innovation is much too big for any corporation. Free market activity will run in all directions, developers just should pay a fee to the person who found the rabbit hole. RCA launched commercial TV by designing a reliable, affordable set, then licensing and helping everyone else to build the market. Jed and Bill are correct that the mind-set of the inventor is not that of the entrepreneur, and both are necessary but in different phases of the process. Few men have both sets of attributes. Obsessive secrecy is self defeating and arises from a 'gimmick' and not masterful discovery. Masterful discovery you teach in a patent and then collect royalties. If you are real innovator, you will work hard to stay ahead of the pack. Mills shows masterful discovery by getting patents and then publishing details of experiments and a massive volume of theory. Optimizing the BLP reactions in applications is not easy, as licensees will find. Those who pay license fees will get help, and those who do not will fall behind. Magnetism is common, its properties 'obvious', but there are subtleties that lead many on to believe that some gimmick, some clever twist, will open the rabbit hole. And this may be true. I know one person, whom I respect, that can make a case that physics go off on a wrong track shortly after Maxwell and went down a path that bypasses many rabbit holes. Application of his insights lies in a realm just beyond our present technological reach. It may be that Mark has a 'masterful discovery', or it may be a 'gimmick'. We won't know until he issues a patent -- then let the games begin. As Mark points out, any important hints dropped to tease us can absolutely destroy his chances of getting patent protection in the current manufacturing powerhouses of the world. Do we really want that? Mark wrote: <snip> > Your views of the patent system are understandable, but I do not happen to > agree. My first job out of college was with Ampex. The tape recorders that > built the company were reverse engineered by RCA, and put into production > with only the nameplate changed. Ampex took them to court and RCA was > forced to cease production and pay Ampex for every machine they had made. > Ampex would have been out of business had RCA not lost the court case. The > company went on to invent the video tape recorder. The failure to make it > for homes was a management error. The Japanese were bright enough to take > advantage of that fact. Sony management also made a basic mistake with its home video recorder. They chose image 'quality' over recording time, not realizing that a four hour recording capability was critical to the US market. JVC and RCA were working on the competitive VHS system. RCA had a group working on another home recorder configuration that did not make it to market, but developments from the RCA project made it into the JVC system. As with the evolution of the LP, Philip's dictation compact cassette, evolution of materials and technology advanced VHS tape from a secondary choice to a very useful medium. VHS has been eclipsed by digital compression technologies in evidence in DV camcorders and DVDs. It is interesting DV camcorders are now broadcast quality, yet the configuration of the tape cartridge and the recording mechanism is essentially that of a VHS recorder. I have lunch weekly with Ray Warren, who was an important figure in RCA's magnetic recording business, and was manager of RCA's home video recorder project as well of a very high tech military magnetic recording group. His patents cover the technology that puts color and hifi sound on VHS recorders, from which RCA derived some $40 million in royalties. As I recall, Ampex based its work on Magnetophone technology developed in Germany during WW2. The Nazis made high quality recordings of Hitler's speeches, whose timing misled some of Allied intelligence intercepts. Bing Crosby financed Ampex's US development of the Magnetophone technology so he could have more flexibility in producing his radio broadcasts. Ampex may have nailed some US patents, and RCA may have taken a parallel course later, with Ampex getting the perks of patent priority; it is not clear that RCA "reverse engineered" the Ampex machines. I will asked Ray about it at our next meeting. It is clear that RCA went down the wrong path to develop a video tape recorder, and Ampex took the correct one. Ampex lacked the electronic skills to put color into its recorder, but RCA did. Eventually a cross-license was arranged whereby RCA got use of the Ampex patents and Ampex got access to RCA's color technology. Both Ampex and RCA lagged in the development of helical scan technology now standard in broadcast quality tape recorders. The essential difference is that at first the heads scanned transversely across a tape 2 inches wide, each sweep including only 17 (?) lines. With helical scan, the drum is larger, the tape narrower, and each sweep includes a frame. > <snip> Mike Carrell.
