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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 08 2012 @ 01:19 PM EDT |
Thing is...starting nearly (software excepted) any sort of
business has a large upfront cost. Particularly when you
consider the rather large probability of failure. (say, 10M
USD, 80% failure rate) So, the resulting business needs to
be worth >50M to even be worth considering...without
expecting to make any return. From my experience, 10M is
really on the low end for a hardware business.
Problem is...copying any sort of successful business has a
very low startup cost (probably 2M). After a few identical
businesses show up, you're looking at structural profit
based on the lower startup cost - so you never, ever make
your money back unless your business plan is obviously
wildly profitable or has strong lock-in.
Even with patent protection and semi-monopoly, the way to
bet is that your business will be a qualified failure until
technology develops a bit further and the IP is acquired by
a larger company. (worked for a guy who started a very, very
early laser diode company) In normal industries, this will
take 12-15 years. Starting a new business is usually an
obviously negative-sum game. Patents help. Patents really do
encourage the creation of new businesses.
In terms of a useful patent,
Goetz's patent at Autoflow had arguably positive effects in
that it created the software market. (sorting method,
possibly inventive, stopped IBM from reverse-engineering and
giving away free copies.) Profit-driven software has in
many cases been more responsive than FOSS. (Really, most
small FOSS projects don't have 24 hr phone support - we
ended up dropping a hdf library because it was way too slow
to fix problems.)
--Erwin
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| Authored by: globularity on Saturday, June 09 2012 @ 02:02 AM EDT |
The crystal diode detector was a Schottky diode rather than a transistor. The
metal oxide and selenium power rectifiers which appeared later were also
Schottky diodes. They were semiconductor devices which predate the transistor by
over 20 years. Many modern RF detectors use schottky diodes as do many high
frequency power rectifiers.
It takes a lawyers mind to argue that a restriction on the use of ideas is
beneficial for the spread of the products of ideas.
---
Windows vista, a marriage between operating system and trojan horse.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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