> My background, btw, was DoE and NSF funded research.

Mine was US national security, computing, applied math,
and associated research around DC. When I
saw commercial technology, I
upchucked. As Betty Davis said, "What a dump."

> much more interesting technically in the private sector

Hope so. But I don't have much hope,
as I explained, due to
the backgrounds of the VC partners and CEOs.
In blunt terms, around DC, I could always
get a competent technical review of my
technical work; in the commercial world,
I've never been able to.

Another explanation for the sick-o
climate of innovation in the US
commercial sector is that the decision
makers, i.e., VC partners and CEOs,
picked some "high payoff" projects,
tried them, saw the projects fail,
and gave up. So, Silicon Valley has
adopted some rules: Regard anything
beyond middle school level material
as blue sky, academic game playing, nonsense
and give up.

Of course the problem was that
the VC partners
and CEOs didn't give competent
technical evaluations of the technical
parts of the projects, and that
because they were incompetent
technically, and, thus, they
picked poor projects. Simple as
that. Again, those decision makers
just did not know how to evaluate
technical projects; plenty of people
in the US do know how do such
evaluations well.

So, now the norm is, don't evaluate
technical projects. Just don't do it.
Instead, evaluate projects much like
an accountant would, that is, based
on assets. The main difference is
that accountants count in dollars,
and the Silicon Valley decision makers
are also willing to count data from
ComScore, Google Analytics, etc. about
traction. The crucial, core technical
internals, if any, they don't care and
don't look.

Intel? I picked them because their work
at 14- nm and their path down from
1 micron has been so easy to notice.
Maybe much of the credit goes to their
vendors for, say, UV sources, optics,
photosensitive materials, positioning
systems, etc.

I used to be impressed with Cisco, but
now I wonder.

Google? For their search engine, they
have written some quite nice code.
I don't see much serious innovation,
e.g., like a drag-free satellite,
the P&W engines for the SR-71,
the Bertsekas polynomial
algorithm for an important assignment
problem, what I mentioned that Breiman
did, but a lot of really nice code.

For their self-driving cars: My guess
is that mostly they are in effect
using electronic tracks and that
people will give up when the
rates of accidents and/or traffic
jams are too high. Then the hope will
be to change the roads to make
Google's efforts with self-driving
cars practical, and my view is that
the roads won't change and self-driving
cars will go the way of turbine engine
cars. At times, driving as it is done
now by humans takes some
actual intelligence, and I don't believe
that anyone knows how to program that.

To me the self-driving cars look
like mostly a publicity stunt, a
head fake with a lot less to it
than meets the eye.

For Silicon Valley's innovation, I would
ask: What is new, correct, significant,
useful, powerful, and valuable and
well beyond a bright, self-educated
high school student and, hopefully,
well beyond essentially any efforts
outside the US.

With that, an example was the SR-71,
especially its engines. Why? The
Soviets also had the MIG 25 that
could go that high and fast but
only for a few minutes before its
ordinary turbojet engines overheated.
Meanwhile the SR-71 kept going along,
80,000+ feet, Mach 3+, for another
1500 miles or so, no problem, never
got shot down. Why? The turbojet
engines converted to ram jet engines
starting near Mach 2 or so and, thus,
didn't overheat. I'm not sure the
USSR ever figured that out. Nice.

In the commercial world, we get
innovation drip, drip instead of
wild, raging rivers like we should.

Actually take away what came from
high quality work for US national
security, and there would be not
much left of the computer industry
or Silicon Valley. No such thing
is true for medical innovation.

Yes, US national security and progress
in medicine (the guys in Congress who
vote for the NIH budgets are old
and want better medical care!)
are the main reasons NSF and NIH research
grants fund ballpark 60% of the
budgets of Stanford, Harvard, Princeton,
Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, etc. Okay.
Fine. Terrific.

But for the rest, there is still too
much dependence on US national security.
US national security is a great goal,
but the commercial world also needs
to take the results of the research
and create
wild, raging rivers of powerful, valuable
innovation instead of the present drip, drip.

As it is, Silicon Valley is doing next
to nothing that a determined effort in
England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland,
Russia, China, South Korea, etc. can't do.
Bummer. Really big bummer. Big time
bummer. Threat to the US economy bummer.
Might put US workers in direct competition
with the 17 cent an hour workers in
China. Did I mention bummer?

So, how to get ahead? Really, there's only
one way -- great, leading edge exploitations
of great, original research. Sorry 'bout that.
To do that, need the decision makers
able to judge the research efforts, the
research results, and promising
exploitations and
make the possibilities real. For that,
the usual MBAs, LLBs, business devs,
marketers, self-taught C++ coders, UI
designers, unicorn CEOs, need not apply.

Or did we notice that Microsoft, China,
and Russia were all able, apparently
quite routinely, to
duplicate Google search? So, where's
the unique, world-class leadership,
which the US very much needs? We don't
have it and are becoming just one more
of the pack of 10 or so countries
that can do nearly anything the US does.
Bummer. We need to get going. For that,
we need project decision makers who
know what the heck they are doing in
innovation.

I feel like I'm trying
to explain the importance of
medical research and innovation to a
country doctor in 1850, the importance
of a drag-free satellite to
an auto mechanic in 1910, the importance
of quantum mechanics to
a radio engineer in 1930, etc.