Fletch When scientists in

Fletch

When scientists in universities or companies come up with new technology it takes an average of 25 years to reach the public consumer level. For universities, this was true before 1980, but the average now is closer to 7 years. This is largely due to the BayhDole Act which gave universities ownership of technologies stemming from federally sponsored research. Since then, Technology Transfer Offices have been created in most if not all universities that perform any significant amount of research. The major goal of these offices is to Fletch technologies from the lab into peoples hands as quickly as possible. To this end, license agreements usually have timed milestone requirements designed to prevent companies from sitting on technologies. I know of over 150 technologies, created in my university within the last 10 years, that are now in consumer products. An average of 25 years would place first sales to the public outside of a technologies patent life. Another goal of Tech Transfer offices is to bring income into the university to support research. Most license deals are structured with small upfront fees along with royalties based on sales. So, there is no incentive to allow a 25 year development life for a technology. I cant speak to the development time of technologies created within a company, but 25 years would require a long-view mentality that I just dont see being feasible in a modern corporate structure. Some technologies have taken that long or longer, I cant beleive that is an average. Wow, thanks for the info. TIL Blu Ray will definitely not be the final physical media, unfortunately. It looked like it was heading in that direction a few years ago, but Telecoms in North America are pushing for unreasonable bandwidth caps to kill off competing services like VOIP and netflix streaming. Something needs to be done about that or well never progress. Can someone explain how companies caps? Especially those ridiculous ones that Canadian companies implemented. Simple: they have a monopoly, and its cheaper to impose caps than it is to build additional capacity to keep up with consumer demand. They can, so they do. While, It is totally possible and probably true they are doing this all just for money. It could be true that what they said about the stress Fletch is true. When P2P first came out, people were soaking up all the bandwidth the companies could put out. So, other people who only used the internet to browse which costs little bandwidth were getting slow connections. So, to be fair, they imposed the caps so people wouldnt put those kind of strains on their servers. At least, thats what I believed for a while. Till I found out people in the USA, with 350mill pop, were only getting 250gig limits.