Top executives in Silicon Valley often have a huge cushion due to a monopoly position and high costs to customers to switch. John Chambers, who built modern-day Cisco, is an exception. While Cisco has a great brand name it has to fight for every sale given that, by definition, its boxes must be able to communicate with all of the rest of the world’s routers and switches.
What does someone like this think of our upcoming presidential election? The MIT alumni magazine, Technology Review, asked him:
Between Trump and Clinton, who has the better technology policies?
If you’re asking, “How do you give middle-class America a pay raise? How do you create opportunities? How do you make the country more competitive on a global basis in a way that allows everybody to benefit? How do you change health care and education?”—well, those questions are all about a digital agenda, and yet I’ve not heard a single candidate articulate a vision on that.
> well, those questions are all about a digital agenda, and yet I’ve not heard a single candidate articulate a vision on that
When asked how secure her server was HRC said that it was guarded by the Secret Service 24/7. She sounds technically illiterate and I would not expect “digital agenda” initiatives from her. I have not heard Trump speak about technology, hopefully he is not as dumb about it
Q: “How do you give middle-class America a pay raise? How do you create opportunities?”
A: cut the number of H1Bs from 200k/yr to 0 and you will create 200k opportunities for middle-class Americans.
Q: “How do you make the country more competitive on a global basis in a way that allows everybody to benefit?”
A: putting tariffs on Chinese imports until the trade deficit is reduced from $400B to $0 would directly create 8M new jobs + a multiplier effect creating another 16-24M jobs.
Q: “How do you change health care and education?”
A: with another 30M middle class Americans employed by the above changes, there will be much more wealth to pay for health care and education.
Where does a “digital agenda” fit in?
Compare the ridiculous amount of national press coverage on gay issues vs. little discussions on strategy/policy for technology and manufacturing. I don’t think our national destiny will be affected as much by the former.
Trading with China has destroyed the healthy cycle of R&D -> Innovation -> High Profit -> Reinvestment into R&D. Entire industries are disappearing and get hollowed out from the US soil and moving overseas. How can private US companies compete against foreign government-subsidized companies, and local markets dictated by government policy rather than product performance/price ratio?
Amen Marvin.
Not only that but I personally witnessed a multi billion dollar deal to sell telecom equipment to China in the late 90s. The Chinese, insisted, if you want to sell anything to us, you must move development to their soil and hire Chinese nationals. Our executives capitulated immediately so that they could book the short term revenue and not have Wall street ask for their heads. As a result we soon laid off several thousand people who previously did this work and shuttered the buildings they were working in. The Chinese started selling their own low cost system based on our tech soon after.
They weren’t even the first to do this to us. The South Koreans did the exact same thing a few years before.
I think it would take at least generation of coordinated effort to get our engineering and manufacturing base reestablished. No one is talking about doing that. Tariffs by themselves would just make everything more expensive in the meanwhile. The economic lead we had after WWII was just thrown away for the magical “service economy” we were promised. Until we try to go back to making actual stuff, all we can do is ask “would you like fries with that?”
Does he provide any basis for his assertion that improving health care and education requires a “digital agenda”? It sounds as if he wants to promote an agenda that would result in more sales of his company’s products.
An alum of MIT who worked with me in the networking business expressed amazement that Chambers made it as far as he did on his WVU biz degree. I don’t know about that, but I know he should have stepped aside and given CEO slot to Jayshree Ullal in ’06-’07 instead of buying worthless companies like Pure Digital (Flip video). Ullal went on to lead Arista Networks which is stealing market share from Cisco because they offer essentially the same performance and reliability for substantially less money.
Arista is going to start manufacturing equipment (through an EMS) in the US to get around the import ban Ci$co got installed. When he says, ‘The penalty for missing [market transitions] is much more than the risk of going after them aggressively’, he means going after them aggressively in court.
So maybe the answer to the question, “How do you make the country more competitive on a global basis in a way that allows everybody to benefit? ” is to impose ITC import bans on technology products so Americans can manufacture them.
Interesting how you all throw out hefty SUREFIRE suggestions for reversal of the trends of the USA’s ongoing devolution, restoring the equilibrium, and kickstarting the reentry of middle class onto the yellow brick road to Universal Happiness. Yet you all pussyfoot around the herd of mastodons in the room, the yuppie bankers with their many ways to wreck the welfare of all in pursuit of the next short term paper profits. Because that’s what the last couple of decades devolution at home and abroad really is about… pursuit of quantifiable results for the top %1 at the expense of future generations that, baring worldwide revolution, will be holding the bag of essentially worthless, because never to be paid back debts/ bills.
ObLitContent: “The Mandibles” by—must be a True America-Hating Commie Firebrand—Lionel Shriver, who’s out to get the very financiers who generate our wealth; while she herself has the gall to call The Next President of the United States, Donald drrrrrrrummmrrrrrolll Trump! a figure beyond the pale of fiction.
Seems like a completely vacuous interview — & pretty typical of a big company CEO, say things that seem zen-like, but won’t offend anyone. Wonder why it was thought worthwhile to direct people to read this.
The ‘digital’ sector is one of the last sources of economic growth in the American (or indeed any western) economy. It has been for about forty years now.
What happens if it suddenly stops growing?
What if, in ten years, we’re talking about “the mastodonts in Sillicon Valley” who get massive government subsidies to peddle their products to uninterested consumers.
It seems prudent to have a non-digital strategy.
What would a digital agenda look like? More wifi? More Fiber? (provided by Cisco, presumably)
Billg: There should be ~500 H1-B visas a year, allocated by auction. (If a company is willing to spend 100K/year on top of salary to get someone here, I’m willing to believe they’d be a net gain for the country)
Clinton’s technology agenda:
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/06/27/hillary-clintons-initiative-on-technology-innovation/
Cannot find anything similar for Trump.