So, you, as venture-capital-extraordinaire, spend all your money on helping the poor. Maybe you do better in the short term. But what do you do once that money's gone? There's no long-term in that picture and charity for developing nations is not a short-term endeavour.
Meanwhile, trivial enterprise and consumer products may not be going to uplift a country any time soon, but they can be recursed upon, and the technologies involved in those industries - which have a wide range of potential applications, including some charitable potential - continue to advance.
It doesn't make any sense to build a system based on what you would like people to be rather than what they are. And for better or worse people's relatively direct purchasing of utilions for others tends to be both fairly rare and inefficient.
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I'd be interested to hear how you think CAM and computing technology would have evolved without funding for 'stupid consumer gambles,' and the need to compete with other manufacturers in that regard.
CAM machining advancements were mostly pushed forward by car companies and government spending, right? Almost all of the computing technology we use today began as a .gov or .mil project, or came from some private lab with funding from the .gov or .mil.
I think that that rather neatly undermines your point.
It wasn't the VCs spending lots of money. The big desktop revolution (outside of Apple) was initially driven by IBM, Commodore, Tandy, and Atari...all relatively established businesses partnering with younger firms for software or whatnot.
Sure, we had Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, but at the end of the day it seems like they're all gone and blown away while the more lasting impacts remain attributed to academia (.edu and .gov again), defense (.mil), or consumer software not really driven by venture capital.
Comments
So, you, as venture-capital-extraordinaire, spend all your money on helping the poor. Maybe you do better in the short term. But what do you do once that money's gone? There's no long-term in that picture and charity for developing nations is not a short-term endeavour.
Meanwhile, trivial enterprise and consumer products may not be going to uplift a country any time soon, but they can be recursed upon, and the technologies involved in those industries - which have a wide range of potential applications, including some charitable potential - continue to advance.
It doesn't make any sense to build a system based on what you would like people to be rather than what they are. And for better or worse people's relatively direct purchasing of utilions for others tends to be both fairly rare and inefficient.
#
I'd be interested to hear how you think CAM and computing technology would have evolved without funding for 'stupid consumer gambles,' and the need to compete with other manufacturers in that regard.
CAM machining advancements were mostly pushed forward by car companies and government spending, right? Almost all of the computing technology we use today began as a .gov or .mil project, or came from some private lab with funding from the .gov or .mil.
I think that that rather neatly undermines your point.
It wasn't the VCs spending lots of money. The big desktop revolution (outside of Apple) was initially driven by IBM, Commodore, Tandy, and Atari...all relatively established businesses partnering with younger firms for software or whatnot.
Sure, we had Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, but at the end of the day it seems like they're all gone and blown away while the more lasting impacts remain attributed to academia (.edu and .gov again), defense (.mil), or consumer software not really driven by venture capital.