The blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.
Really annoying that the company shat on him for years, and continued to do so after he multiplied the value of the company. Toxic behavior.
It’s an extreme example that perfectly illustrates how profit is extracted from employees by the employers. He didn’t have any leverage to get a larger share of the profit from his labor, as is the case with most employees. You could call it toxic behavior, and it is, but it’s the expected behavior, the behavior incentivised by the system.
It also shows how capitalism hinder innovation. It doesn’t create it. The potentially innovative path took money without any guarantee of creating profit. It’s bad business to be innovative. Capitalism prioritizing profit never chooses the best path, even if it gets a good ending eventually despite itself.
It’s a capitalist company that funded him to go to Florida and bought him the machine to do his work.
Where do you think he would get the 3 million the company gave him? It’s the company that spent that money to bet on innovation and they got a return on investment
Capitalism never chooses the best path, but neither does any other system. We haven’t invented a perfect system, and it’s probably impossible. Sounds like a strange critique since we’ll never reach perfection
I’m not sure how you come to this conclusion. For every example of a capitalist avoiding risky investments, there are 100 capitalists betting on the next innovation.
Venture capital. Heard the term? AI, Metaverse, crypto, web 2.0, .com… The tech space alone is full of capital making (stupidly risky) bets. They also make good bets too, like PC, search engines, online shopping (oh, look how the tech giants came to be).
I get it, capitalism bad. But this is just a nonsensical argument.
Capitalists are motivated to innovate if there’s undistorted competition. If they don’t they will lose new markets. For exemple Microsoft and IBM failed to build the start of general public web search and Google won. More recently, Google failed the race to release the first general public LLM, OpenAI backed by Microsoft did.
There are probably as many examples of this as there are of companies ruining innovation for stupid reasons.
Though, what better system that a regulated “free” market do we have successfully tested? A bunch of political leaders deciding alone of what the companies should do? How does that prevent irrational decision that stops innovation? How do you prevent them from just doing whatever benefits them as seen in many authoritarian regimes that were supposedly socialist?
Makes me presume power harassment.
On the flip side, he was using up millions and millions of company dollars on his singleminded pursuit with no obvious results to show for it. Had things gone even a little differently, things would’ve gone very differently indeed. Hard to imagine most companies tolerating an employee flat ignoring instruction to change to another task when their old task was proving fruitless.
Hindsight is clear enough here, but in context it was pretty nuts what the guy was doing.
Makes you wonder how many great inventors of revolutionary tech were shoved off their path by dumb luck.
Probably far fewer than never had the opportunity to realize they could be great in the first place.
If greatness is one in a billion we have 8 (boy would the richest like us to believe that!). If it’s one in 100 million (I’m bad at math. I think it’s like) 80. Or if it’s one in a million, that’s 350 in the US alone. I’m inclined to lean toward the later, after all, if there aren’t a lot of greats waiting to be called up, how the fuck did we beat the odds by such a large margin??
