Social microcosm definition8/5/2023 ![]() merchant semiconductor companies will perish, and U.S. ![]() Echoing Grove, Sanders, and Charles Sporck, president of National Semiconductor, he declares that without urgent and decisive government action, American semiconductor producers cannot compete in global markets. His case against American entrepreneurs rings with conviction and authority. 2Ī former consultant at both IBM and LSI Logic, Ferguson shows intimate knowledge of the computer establishment and the semiconductor industry. ![]() In the late 1980s, however, a new cadre of more sophisticated analysts has arisen to buttress the argument-most prominently a young scholar at MIT named Charles Ferguson, who emerged as a vocal Cassandra of American microelectronics. ![]() In the face of Silicon Valley’s success, surging forward with ever greater force as government business dwindled, their arguments seemed unconvincing. Entrepreneurs can best serve as niche suppliers or subcontractors to major corporations. Such figures as Reich, Lester Thurow of MIT, and Chalmers Johnson of Berkeley have long maintained that whether mobilizing for war or for peace, government nearly always plays the leading role in evoking, developing, and financing new technology. manufacturers currently damaged by noncommercial Pentagon priorities and personnel demands, the idea of industrial policy seemed to vindicate the leading scholars of the Left. Their ideas bore fruit in Sematech, a chip manufacturing research and development consortium to be funded half by industry and half by government. government to reshape and subsidize the industry. “We are in a demolition derby and some of us are going to die.”įor the Silicon Valley patriarchs, the remedy was intervention by the U.S. industry, piece by piece,” Grove claimed. “The Japanese are systematically destroying the U.S. Weakened by “chronic entrepreneurialism” (the coinage of Robert Reich of Harvard), the theory went, many semiconductor companies were headed for catastrophe. To the entrepreneurs, it was as if Julius Erving had accosted Michael Jordan and solemnly informed him that his basketball career was over unless he learned not to jump. The leaders of the flagship Silicon Valley companies were bringing a serious message: in the future, success would depend on cooperation and cheap capital, planning and political savvy, lifetime employment and government research. But amid the late 1980s carnage in microchips, with the Japanese sweeping ahead in some measures of market share, the easy answers beg the question. That’s an understandable response from today’s young entrepreneurs. Lamond tried to laugh off the complaints of Sanders and others as merely the maundering of old men who want the world to stop turning as soon as they get on top. So far these companies have just ripped off the big firms without contributing anything significant.” 1 You can’t fill large fabs with niche products. After the first 50 million, believe me, it gets much harder. But all these small firms want to get big, and that means unfocused. Static RAMs are not exactly a major innovation. “You took my best guys to Cypress,” Sanders charged, “and they made 3 million last year on 14 million in sales. In a memorable encounter at a Dataquest conference, Jerry Sanders, chairman of Advanced Micro Devices, confronted Pierre Lamond, once a leading figure at National Semiconductor and now a leading venture capitalist. Not only did American vultures and headhunters prey on his best people, he said, but also the stock market appraised the fabs and fantasies of Intel defectors at many times the value of the real chips and achievements of Intel itself. Intel President Andrew Grove added that his company was threatened as much by Wall Street as by Japan. Intel Chairman Gordon Moore denounced the venture capital financiers as the “vulture capitalists” of Sand Hill Road, the Palo Alto promenade of venture funds. A protest rang out from the leaders of Silicon Valley itself that far from an asset, the startup culture had become American industry’s gravest weakness in competing with Japan. In the late 1980s, however, the heralds of entrepreneurship as the key to American competitiveness have faced a serious embarrassment. technology has long held firm: a key American asset is the startup culture of Silicon Valley and similar centers of entrepreneurship. From Ronald Reagan’s White House to the centers of French socialism, from the speeches of Democratic liberals to the pages of Britain’s Economist, one assumption about U.S. ![]()
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