As some of you may know I am a computer systems engineer by trade, and it occurred to me as I was busy designing a piece of software the other day that I have to design to the Microsoft way of doing things. Why, not necessarily because it’s best, or cheapest, but simply because my users are conditioned to thinking in the Microsoft way.
So it got me thinking, do monopolies control both market thought and marketplace?
The short answer, yes they do, why, because it benefits their marketplace control. Thought is the only commodity that is owned by the individual, the outcome of the thought can be owned by an employer, but the thought/idea itself, is the individual’s.
It is risky business encouraging innovation within your monopoly, as the innovator has the ability to get up, leave you and take their thought to a competitor or find the funds to do it themselves, even when you have them locked up in contracts. Thoughts only come into existence once the thinker has acknowledged them; an employer has no way of forcing an innovator to acknowledge the thought.
So how does a monopoly remain a monopoly if they don’t innovate? If one analyses the problem, one can see that it is much more effective and risk reducing to have a strangle hold on innovative thought, then it is to constantly be staying two feet in front of your competitors. For example, Microsoft did a great job of seeing innovation in other companies and ‘offering’ to buy them. They then took the innovation and incorporated it into their own construct, often losing the most innovating part, however more importantly they removed the risk of innovation in the marketplace. They maintained their monopoly on thought.
Now, this is an engineering blog, so I better make it relevant. Obviously this is relevant to me being in computers and those of you in the communications sector, and it affects all of us as individuals, but I need to supply an example of this in the real world.
The NBN will probably remain a sensitive topic of conversation in the public domain until it has been running for a significant amount of time. I’ve kept pretty much out of it, however doing some research this morning, I noticed that the main supplier of network equipment, Alcatel-Lucent, is the also the owner of Bell Laboratories.
Bell Labs, as they are also known, have been around in one form or another since at least the 1920s. They have won 7 Nobel Prizes, developed transistors, lasers and the C++ programming language, yet now their owner is a marketplace supplier, more interested in ‘focusing on more immediately marketable areas’ (Wired, 2008), than fundamental physics research. This is the problem with monopolies controlling innovation, as Peter Benedict, spokesperson for Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent Ventures says, “In the new innovation model, research needs to keep addressing the need of the mother company."
Monopolies insist on putting limits and restrictions on our imagination, on our creation and our innovation. If a monopoly is in a power struggle with another similar sized organisation, each trying to get the upper hand, innovation is often the first thing to be cut.
This behaviour is understandable, the keystone to a monopoly’s survival is in reducing the competitive edge of the marketplace and this is done by ensuring that your competitors never have the ability to out manoeuvrer you. Restrict innovation in the marketplace as a whole and you reduce this risk.
I hope as young engineers out there that you manage to remain outside the monopoly umbrella and keep your innovative thoughts alive. I hope you have a back shed, to give room to solidify your thoughts and I trust you have people around you that support and understand the importance of innovation to humanity. Innovation got us out of caves, not profits!
Reference:
Ganapati, Priya (2008-08-27). "Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research". Wired. Retrieved 18/02/2012
Author: Gamila MacRury
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