If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
Rob Long ·
Aug 11, 2011 at 9:43am
The evolution of the mobile phone, from Vespoe:
If the government had been in charge of mobile phone development, you'd have to reverse the order.
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Feb '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
Wonderful graphic!
If only other technologies kept up with this level of progress... but I guess every technology follows its own S-curve.
Jun '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
Just showed this to my teen daughter who laughed out loud --- "That's crazy!"
Dec '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
We may not know what a Government-designed mobile phone would look like, but we've go a pretty good idea what a government-contractor-designed mobile device would look like.
A few years ago, the federal government sought contractors to design and build a handheld device to use in the 2010 census. The final product, which apparently was introduced long after Apple introduced the iPhone, was a disaster--a buggy piece of junk on which more than half a billion dollars had been wasted, and which the census bureau ultimately rejected in favor of clipboards, pencils, and paper.
Here's what it looked like.
And here are the details.
Feb '11
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
The trend is a reduction in size by a factor of 4 each decade in each dimension. Thus 3-dimensional objects are being miniaturized by a factor of 64 each decade. Television dimensions have gotten thinner but with larger screens. That trend will also continue. And the government has funded much of the research for this trend beginning with NASA and continuing with the Dept. of Defense both for research and as major customers. The natural outcome of this miniaturization trend will be nanotechnology.
Sep '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
If you reverse the graphic you get the federal government spending curve, or the Canadian Federal Government (Rob) Long Gun Registry:
Dec '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
Rob - If the government were in charge of all telecommunications ... we would still be using rotary dial phones with an operator plugging in connections ... there wouldn't be such a preposterous thing as a cell phone.
Dec '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
In some sense, the "phones" are now microscopic. They're integrated into elaborate computing devices. It's an added feature rather than the primary one.
Sep '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
The superb result of a lightly regulated industry with plenty of competition.
Help, Ricos. My faith in industry self-regulation has been shaken by the recent news of Cargill selling dangerously contaminated ground turkey. What were these people thinking? They were not even complying with the lax USDA standards, and now they are wide open for big-time lawsuits.
Can anyone explain this from a libertarian perspecitve?
Aug '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
The California and Washington DMVs can take credit for two of the largest IT failures of all time. In 1987, California embarked on a 5-year plan to record and track licenses. It was supposed to cost $27 million, but the state had spent $49 million before pulling the plug on the project because the new system was slower than the old one.
Washington's DMV tried a similar plan, called LAMP - it was sold to voters as a $16 million dollar automation project which would streamline and speed up access to DMV records. $67 million dollars later, the project was canceled because it still wasn't working and new auditors determined it would cost six times as much to operate as the old system.
The FBI blew through $500 million dollars trying to digitize all its case files, before scrapping the project because the requirements kept changing and that caused numerous re-writes to the code to the point where it was so buggy and unmanageable that it became useless.
These failures generally have one major cause - the politicization of engineering decisions, which leads to scope creep, constantly changing requirements, and chaotic project management.
Aug '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
Steven Drexler: The Cargill case should really shake your faith in government: The USDA knew about problems at Cargill for over a year, and did nothing.
This is a complex topic, but the Libertarian answer is that when government steps in to guarantee safety, it removes responsibility for it from the marketplace. People become complacement. Then if government can't do the job, people get hurt.
Libertarians don't rely on the good will of companies or assume that they will behave well. They know that their behavior needs to be regulated. The choice is whether you want government to regulate them, or the forces of the market, which are actually much stronger. But government involvement weakens those forces and leads to gray areas such as this, where everyone assumed someone else was responsible.
If you want to see how market forces regulate, have a look at the Tylenol poisonings. When a crazy person put poison in some Tylenol bottles, Tylenol's market share instantly plummeted. The company then voluntarily took steps to recall all Tylenol, redesign their bottles to be tamper-proof, and the entire industry moved away from liquid gel-caps to solid caplets. Billions spent. No government.
Aug '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
Another example of a major failure of government technology planning: France's Minitel system. At the time, the big concern among progressive technophiles was that the internet would stagnate because of a chicken-and-egg problem: No one would buy computers or sign up for online services unless there were products and services online they wanted, but no one would build those products and services unless more people bought computers and online accounts. France's government decided to 'invest' in the infrastructure to break this logjam, so it created its own online services, then gave citizens free terminals to use them.
For about two years, this was seen as an example of how government could direct the economy in productive ways and improve on the market. But then the internet took off, and private markets and competition rocketed its capabilities past Minitel almost overnight. France had locked itself into a dinosaur, and the result was that France lagged behind the rest of Europe in internet adoption for years, putting it at a competitive disadvantage. All that Minitel money was not just a waste, it was counterproductive.
Jun '10
Re: If the Government was a Mobile Phone Company....
If the government had been in charge, you would have to get on a 10-year waiting list to be allowed to buy your big honkin' cellphone. It would be brown and cost $5,000.