Technology

So you've admitted that all primary research is done in the public sector, because of course it is. Exploratory primary research is not guaranteed to be profitable. That leaves only what is relatively guaranteed to be profitable for private industry. And what is guaranteed to be profitable is... not exactly very innovative. By definition it has to be fairly obvious.

So the other things you've mentioned are all implementations; optimisations towards local minima/maxima. Mass production is a more or less solved problem, figuring out how to deal with specific problems that crop up in individual production pipelines is work, certainly, but it's not innovation. This is boilerplate stuff. Every factory since the dawn of factories has done it. And even to get there, you had to dig deep into relatively unknown silicon valley companies that most people have never heard of. They are not Apple, not even close.

And the semiconductor industry is somewhat unique in that they're in the middle of a half-century-long slide down towards a distant local minimum, specifically the size of their transistors. That means they can continue to make iterative changes that they know will give them payoffs. We know they know they will pay off because there are multiple companies in competition developing this technology in parallel and they are more or less keeping pace with one another. If they were coming up with true innovations that wouldn't happen.

Number of patents tells you nothing about what is actually being developed. I will admit I was perhaps too zealous in saying they "don't develop", because obviously the things you mentioned are a form of development, it's just that they are predictable advancements, which means anybody with the funding to hire engineers could pull it off. They are advancements in the same way a train advances along a track. They are low-hanging fruit. These companies didn't till the soil, plant the trees or nurture them. They just came along at harvest season, plucked the apples off the branches and called themselves farmers.

If you call that sort of thing "innovation", I would say you have a very low bar for that term.

Also, it seems to me that you, like the other person, threw out a lot of technical sounding details all at once that certainly seemed to drive towards a point. Perhaps you hoped I couldn't discern the difference between what you were saying and real innovation - you did say I had "no idea" - or perhaps you actually think they're the same thing. In any case, I do understand enough about this process to see through this, but someone less technically informed wouldn't. I'm not terribly impressed with someone attempting to bury me in the weeds like that.

If you had a real slam-dunk example of innovation that you could point to, I imagine you would've done it. You can't though, because for example with DRAM, future iterations of the same technology aren't fundamentally any different and operate on the same basic principles developed in the public sector, and I think you know that.