Sun Setting On Uncle Sam's IT Empire

[Steve Schear]

[Note: this is a posting from Dave Farber's IP list. Dave has some 
interesting points to make about the decline and fall of IT in the US.]

>The following is an article published in the Australian Financial Review
>reporting on a talk I gave at the First Tuesday meeting in the new
>IT/residential complex being developed in the Gold Coast in Queensland
>Australia on 4 Nov 2001. There were about 100 + people attending and they
>were highly interactive. A streaming video was taken and I am trying to get
>it on line and available for IPers.
>
>Till then this article requires a bit of commentary by me to put certain
>comments in perspective and to slightly elaborate on the reporters
>comments. I have inserted then in [..].
>
>Please also note that the article uses quotations that are snips of a hour
>long talk and question period and that context and detail are missing. I
>intend to produce a more complete white paper elaborating several of the
>points I have made.
>
>I understand this steps on many feet but I believe what I said at the talk.
>
>As usual comments are welcome.
>
>Dave
>
>______________________________________________________________________________
>
>Sun Setting On Uncle Sam's IT Empire
>
>Helen Meredith 09/07/2001
>
>Australian Financial Review
>
>The global dominance of the American IT sector was in decline, with its
>industrial research labs dead and the industry no longer rich, a leading US
>researcher and academic told a group of technologists on the Gold Coast
>this week.
>
>Dr David Farber, a former adviser to president Bill Clinton and chief
>technologist at the Federal Communications Commission, said the US economy
>was not healthy and the IT industry was perceived to be in deep trouble.
>``We are seeing the passing of an era in which we did some grand
>experiments. The net bubble burst with a vengeance. We had forgotten one
>very important thing you need a business plan to survive,'' he said.
>
>``Now we are having a healthy dose of reality but it has taken too long to
>happen. ``In what was once a rich industry, most companies have backed off
>or destroyed their research. We are creating a lost generation.' [ leading
>to the lack of new ideas and people to create them] ' The US Government was
>going to have to accept that industry could no longer fund R&D. Innovation
>would have to come out of the experimental science labs of the
>universities. It would be up to the universities to generate the next wave
>of technology, and to do this they would need government support. If this
>wasn't forthcoming, the country's IT would be starved of a future.
>
>[One senior manager of USG research is quoted as saying that research in IT
>is no longer needed since the USG can buy what it needs. My belief is that
>it will most likely have to buy it from China and other counties who will
>take the leadership the US is giving up]
>
>[ I added that there are several research labs left -- most notable
>Microsoft and IBM and that Microsoft's was in the spirit of places like the
>old Bell Labs while IBM was still active but increasingly obligated to show
>a profit and thus tended to be short focused]
>
>Dr Farber stressed that the role of government was to supply money and
>direction but not detail. ``Let the people who know how make the decisions
>and we all know that no sane bureaucrat is going to take a gamble [ again a
>broad evaluation worldwide especially parts of Asia]. What we need them to
>do is invest,'' he said. The dilemma was that the bureaucracy lacked IT
>know-how. ``The current Administration [ in the USA] is not hostile to
>IT,'' Dr Farber said. ``It just doesn't quite get it. One of the things you
>find out when you're working in Washington is that decisions made that are
>critical to our future and that require an understanding of technology are
>being made in the almost total absence of knowledge.
>
>[ I was making sweeping generalizations as was appropriate given the world.
>Places like the FCC have access, not enough, to technical input but they
>are one of the exceptions in a dismal picture ]
>
>``We [ the USA] are not alone in this. There are signs of the same thing
>happening in Australia. You need to get down to Canberra and help
>government know what the devil it is doing.''
>
>The crisis in the IT industry coincided with the onset of the broadband
>era. This was about to have a profound effect on society, in which the next
>10 years would have as big an impact as computing did in the past 30. The
>impetus would be the real arrival of optical technology, promising 80
>gigabits per wave per strand providing the bandwidth of the entire US
>backbone on a single strand.
>
>``This will have a profound impact,'' Dr Farber said. ``TCP/IP
>[transmission control protocol/internet protocol] will probably not survive
>this. Packet switching is probably the wrong idea for optical networking.
>Photons don't like to have things done to them photonic packets [switching
>at high speed] look[s] extremely difficult.''
>
>Running broadband to every house would pose particular problems for the
>incumbents. It seemed likely that municipalities and cities would take on
>the role of supplying data paths for their inhabitants, on the basis that
>fibre was no different from services such as electricity and water.
>
>``More and more of us will be un-anchored in the future,'' Dr Farber said.
>Mobility would be a key component of this. ``There will be a change to the
>way we do spectrum. It has been wasted,'' he said. ``In the US we have
>fenced it off, and done nothing with it, like putting barbed wire around
>empty paddocks [Australianized].There will need to be some redefinition of
>what it is to own spectrum, perhaps looking at something like the UK
>approach to public access to land.''
>
>Dr Farber predicts 3G will have the shortest life of any mobile system in
>history. He describes it as the last of the analog systems, saying: ``When
>you look at the prices paid, you wonder where they got their accounting
>from. The 802-11 technology now starting to pop up all over the world would
>be the foundation for 4G, becoming a ubiquitous wireless service.''
>
>Dr Farber is the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications
>Systems at the University of Pennsylvania.