Re: [ossig] Govt ICT infrastructure

[Seah Hong Yee <hongyee@polyscientific.com.my>]

> But then again, how did Taiwan become so big in semiconductors relatively
> quickly (wasn't TSMC only formed in 1987?)   Surely a software industry,
> which is much less capital intensive, could grow much faster than that, *if
> everything was done right*.

I am a bit of a Michael Porter fan.  I think healthy competition instead of 
govt-supervised beauty contest would work better. 

TSMC and Taiwan's semicon industry was largely a private sector initiative, in 
the 80's Taiwan's govt wanted to be a leader in the automobile industry, ask 
yourselves have you seen a Taiwanese made car lately. 

Similarly, Japanese govt tried to promote a competative semiconductor industry 
in the 70's and 80's with various VLSI projects (which was successful) and 
microprocessor projects ( which failed). The result today would show that, in 
the 80's Japan took most of the top 5 spot in global semiconductor industry. 
Today, not even one are in the top 3 spot.  Open up a PC today, you will 
hardly find any Japanese parts inside, even when you do, they are usually 
lower end products.  CPU and GPU are almost always American or Canadian, 
Memory usually goes to Korean or Taiwanese, chipset, again Taiwanese or 
Americans.... In fact, you hardly even find Japanese processors in printers, 
a lot of printers today are actually using PowerPC as the processors. 

>
>
> Imran


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