I want Barack Obama to re-state his pledge to bolster the technology industry so we can return to an era of the Next New (Big) Thing. We need breakthroughs, not more tweets and twitters.
No knock on Web 2.0 startups, but what are the chances that new social-networking gizmos and other low-cost projects will ignite our economy? The late '70's and early '80's, hardly boom-times, saw the rise of Apple and Microsoft. It wasn't just the startups. IBM plunged headlong into the whole new business of personal computers. It was the era when Genentech was founded and went public. Decades later, while the dot-coms were melting down, Apple was getting into the music business and Google was becoming an icon.
Props to Obama for pushing universal broadband service and a permanent R&D tax credit, but that's just a start. We need new incentives for long-term technology investments, more resources for university research, and a massive push in science education on the scale we saw a generation ago in the wake of the Soviet launch of Sputnik. This pushed science to center of national consciousness. When he took office, John Kennedy made science training a priority in his call to literally reach for the moon. This paved the way for what would become a national transformation in which Silicon Valley became part of the landscape. Think of what this same kind of mobilization could do today in creating new markets and jobs in energy, transportation and infrastructure. Now that would amount to real hope and change.
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