Australia - A leader in the technology field?..don’t feed us crap Howard!
July 23rd, 2007 Drazen Drazic Posted in Bad Stuff, Disclosure Laws, Dumb Security, WTF, cyber crime, governance |
I feel sick and angry everytime the Australian Government takes a position and promotes how great they are at keeping Australia as a leader in IT and Technology. What a load of crap!
Lets have a look at some facts:
- In the early 90s Australian companies were doing some amazing things with IT. The old saying was, “we did so much more, with so much less” so was true. So many Oz companies were showing their global colleagues how to do things. That doesn’t seem to happen as much now from what I see.
- We had great early take-up of the Internet, technology in general and mobile. I remember in the mid-nineties doing a lot of work in Asia: Singapore, HK, Thailand and even Japan and thinking, gees, Australia is so far ahead of you guys……not anymore….not even close.
- Most emerging IT Companies out of the US were basing their Asia Pacific HQs out of Sydney, Australia in the early to mid-nineties……not anymore…..any left at all?
- IT guys saw a big future in our industry here at home.
Since then:
- How many great Oz and NZ IT people are doing some amazing things OS because they realised they had no opportunities to do these things at home?
- How far behind the world are we in technology deployment? (and don’t quote me Internet use stats - cool, but on slow speeds…who cares?)
- How many Big companies call Australia home as their Asia Pacific base?
- How many IT geniuses believe they can achieve their best by staying at home?
- We’ve become a follower!
Australia has moved forward but we’ve moved forward at a far slower rate than most of our major trading partners and regional neighbours. We’re not a force in IT which I believe we once were but we produce great people who do go on and become a force around the world. Please Howard, don’t bullshit us anymore on how great your technology policies and initiatives have been. We don’t have much to show for it from a Government perspective.
My thoughts on the security side of things are well documented in here. Enough said for now…..
July 24th, 2007 at 10:03 am
I hope there’s enough room for Big Galoot to stand side-by-side on this particular soap box topic. If not, stand aside & get well out of my way, I want to let off some steam here…
I have a suspicion about why Australia has fallen behind in the IT game. I lay blame directly upon our elected officials. But are we to blame for electing them ? Partially, yes. We have allowed them to become complacent and reactive, rather than proactive.
But look who have been in the portfolio for Communications -Richard Alston & Helen Coonan. Two names that don’t exactly inspire me with confidence. For instance, do you really think that Richard Alston would know what TCP/IP is ? Do you really think that Helen Coonan would be able to explain how YouTube or MySpace works ? I think not.
-Big Galoot.
September 2nd, 2007 at 7:04 pm
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