It's one thing to have the world in your hands – what are you going to do with it? I used to think technology could change the world. Google's vision is different: it just wants you to sort of play with the world. That's fun, but it's not as powerful as it could be. Despite the fact that it often gives me a stomach-churning sense of motion sickness, I've been spending quite a bit of time lately fully …
There you have it!
Whenever any human concept is overwhelmed by a monolithic, inward thinking monopoly whether it is an IT giant or a church, the end result is a stifling of innovation and out of the box thinking in preference of whatever it is that profits the monolith most and what enables it's continued control.
*shrug*
There have been all kinds of good ideas that never took hold or which were squashed by incompetent but more voracious competitors.
Microsoft was *built* on that kind of behavior; so was Google. MOST American mega-corps are.
Decency, "what should be", and "what is good for people" don't come into it. All they're concerned about is their bottom financial line and the shareholder payouts. Any claims otherwise are just gloss and advertising to put a "feel good" spin on the underlying greed.
"they are legally obliged to 'maximise shareholder value' "
Yes, however 'shareholder value' does not necessarily mean bottom line. As shareholders have also traditionally/historically been members of local communities, company initiatives for the local community increased shareholder value. As did good treatment of employees, and all the hundreds of tiny other things that increased the company's status in the local community. This is not just bullshit, it can actually be formally accounted for on a company balance sheet under 'Goodwill'.
The problem is that since more or less the Reagan / Thatcher / Gordon Gecko era, 'shareholder value' has come to be indistinguishable from 'current share price', and companies will do anything to keep teh current (or near future) share price high, even at the expense of the long term future of the company
This is in part because a perverse incentive means that short term company value gives promotions and bonuses. A long term secure future, rational expansion and healthy profits do not. On the contrary they lead to carpet baggers buying up the company and stripping the assets. Particularly true when a brand's name carries more value than its products. As with high street retailers.
That recent explosion of filament-deposition printers? That's because the basic patent expired.
FDM printers are the "dot matrix" of 3D printers. More advanced stuff like laser sintering is still under patent by companies very eager to sue.
The recent new stereolithography (SLA) and digital light processing (DLP) 3D printing is because those patents expired too.
See how patents hold technology back?
That's one of those "yes" and "no" comments. Yes patents prevent new technologies spreading out to the world, but no, they protect and enable the investment that can create big new technologies.
I think, maybe, the answer is that patent laws need to discriminate more between inventions, technologies and concepts.
An invention needs full protection. A technology needs limited protection to make sure that it gets developed. A concept must never be withheld. Where the line gets drawn is for the legislators, Lord help us.
I'd struggle to find anyone who doesn't find the patents system fundamentally broke. Large companies swamp the patents office with massively over-generalised approaches that to a layman looks like common-sense.
Protecting your patent requires large pockets and only suits, yep, large companies. If you're a small company with some innovation, pretty much most of advice (certainly in the UK) wrt patenting will say don't bother, its an expensive diversion, use your small company agility to exploit your innovation and try and stay ahead of the competition.
Again, yes and no. Emerging markets have no standards save for those that got there first (and even that's not guaranteed). Going off and inventing your own tech or variation of is only really viable if you known you can do it better than the completion (be it better supported, better marketed, more reliable or with better features).
Otherwise if you're only offering the same but different markets tend not to be interested. See the various media format wars for the most visible example (cassettes, floppy disks, video cassettes, video disk formats etc etc).
That's quite an interesting one. Since a number of these technologies failed because the companies tried to be too greedy- thinking they had the market sewn up - but it meant their device couldn't take off.
An example was the "Super Floppy" LS-130 or some such imaginative name. It was good, at the time. Could have been brilliant for a while. But the discs were so expensive it became unviable. Once alternative arrived, like rewritable Cds, it was dead, even though it had various physical advantages..
It is also about "acceptance" of said technology. Especially if your product is to be utilized by any particular industry or large group.
Look at home video! Sony Beta-Max was obviously superior in video quality compared to VHS. But the adoption of VHS as the standard by an industry that could command a huge audience for videos played in the privacy of people's homes (the porn industry) effectively killed Beta-Max.
Better does not always = success.
I think the observed result here is that patents allowed the technology to be initially developed and monetised and now , many years later, are holding back new development.... those 2 things together suggest not that patents are bad, but maybe they are being applied for too long a term.
After all, the world used to be 'slower', if it takes 5-10 years to take an invention to market and there's only a local market to monetise, it used to make sense to have patents last longer. Now that you can get production scaled up quickly and sell a product worldwide, maybe the patent period should be shortened?
If it's a case of highly complex interconnecting patents where an original discovery many years ago was a key foundation for something that could only be monetised many years later, maybe start the clock from 'first commercial product' rather than from 'patent was filed'.
"See how patents hold technology back?"
A few years ago (during the height of the Samsung vs Apple patent spat) I was in Cornwall and visited the Levant mine where that day they were running their restored beam engine. The person in charge was chatting to people about the history of steam engines. The thing that struck me was that he explained that after Isaac Watt (who he described as a thoroughly unpleasant person) had "invented" the steam engine he patented it and spent most of the rest of his life suing people and pressuring parliament to increase the length of patent protection. However, he said that while Watt had the patent for efficient steam engines, someone else had the patent for the crankshaft so Watt was forced to use ineffient sun and planet gears ... and the industrial revolution really only took off when these patents expired and people could use an efficient steam engine with an efficient means of converting linear movement of a piston into rotary movement of a wheel which had been held back for ~30 years by patents.
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