[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Tuesday 12 December 2006 19:36, paul sutton wrote: > http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.show.article.page&obj_id=1303 He, as many do, seem to miss the two major points: 1) A US firm can sell a crock of shit for 2 or three times the price on a high quality product from a non US company - we had a Buy British campaign once - the Americans just buy American unless there is no alternative. If you want to break into the US market you have to pour a vast amount of money into an American branch - unless your a queen or something, princesses don't count if I remember rightly. 2) Funding for companies in the UK requires you to already being making a killing and not need it, and is generally called asset stripping in other countries. The US lets companies develop (ish) - in this country you have to provide 5% return by day 2 or your stock crashes and you get wiped. I worked for BT many moons ago and we could have made a 2.4Gb fibre optic t switch for about 5 US dollars- thats 2.4Gb in and out in fibre and ditto in ECL. The out going fibre would have sent it 10Km with a 10**-14 error rate. Now BT didn't want to develop it as they'd just been Privatised and decided they didn't do research any more. * All the work was public domain so I set up a business plan. We needed £20M to get started (BT could have done it for 0.5Million) but I figured with a fibre optic component cheaper than the labour to install it we could be looking at sales of a billion units a year within 2 years. No-one in this country would touch it and the boys in the states wanted too much information - like I say it was all public domain. So here I am, bitter and twisted, 16 years later sending this e-mail down a 512k broadband line! The boys with the money don't generally understand technology - and the ones that do know they are in trouble if it gets a hold - image starting a bank and making 0.5% on every transaction - even if you had to introduce ID cards to bring fraud down you'd still be making a killing. And then remember Laker Airways. Sorry I think I got out of the wrong side of the earth this morning! Tom te tom te tom * if anyone knows of the technological equivalent of the GPL I can give them a rough idea of how it worked under that... -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html