See:
http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/images/Presidents_letter_04.05.pdf
Note Fig. 1. This illustrates the point I have
often made, that most high-tech discoveries have
been paid for and/or developed by Uncle Sam, not
by industry. Industry does a good job at
incremental innovation. Big breakthroughs come
mainly from universities and the U.S. and UK governments.
Quote from first page:
"Alas, the world has changed since the heady days
of the 1970s that laid the foundation of 20th
century IT. While the industry has expanded
dramatically, and many IT companies spend
billions on research and development, little is
for long-term research. For example, Microsoft
spends $7.5 billion on R&D, but less than 5% on
long-term research via Microsoft Research. Yet
Microsoft is to be congratulated, for many of the
newer companies that expanded ITfor example,
Cisco, Dell, and Oracledo not make any
significant investment on R&D that looks forward
more than one product cycle; in fact, they have no research labs."
In my opinion, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison
(Oracle) are great programmers. I mean that
sincerely. They have made tremendous
contributions. But their work has been purely
incremental. Other people such as Grace Hopper,
Niklaus Wirth, Leonard Kleinrock, Bob Kahn, Vint
Cerf made fundamental innovations; Gates and
Ellison built upon them. Note that everyone in
the first category was employed by the U.S. and
Swiss governments, and the state of California
(UCLA, Stanford). As far as I know they did not
make one dime in royalties, so money was not the
motivating factor. Don't let anyone tell you that
without monetary reward genius will not flower.
Earlier in the century, people at Bell Labs,
Texas Instruments and DEC made Nobel class
contributions, but it hasn't happened lately. No
one knowledgeable about computer science would
confuse Gates with someone like Robert Kahn.
Gates is not in line to win the Turing Award!
- Jed
