Britain has yet to produce the equivalent of a Microsoft, Apple or Google, but if we are embarking on a second industrial revolution at least one Briton would qualify as the man who launched it – Sir Tim Berners-Lee, father of the internet.
He launched the web, not the internet.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Marksany // Aug 28, 2011 at 8:29 am
ARM
2 Surreptitious Evil // Aug 28, 2011 at 9:24 am
Bugger. Marksany got there first with the obvious answer.
Can I flag up Wolfson Micro as an “on the way there”?
And to paraphrase, that Dyson bloke’s not doing badly (it is supposed to be about manufacturing, not about computers. And Google don’t actually make much for sale, do they?)
Does that make it a D, then – “failed” in old language?
3 Richard // Aug 28, 2011 at 10:14 am
ARM is only a 50th the size of Google (by turnover) and a 100th the size of Apple or Microsoft.
That’s not bad, since those three are huge, but it’s a long way from being “equivalent”.
4 David Gillies // Aug 28, 2011 at 7:00 pm
ARM is smaller than Google or Apple in terms of market cap, but in terms of installed user base it’s about as big as both of them put together. It’s only because it’s cheap as chips to license an ARM core (and if it weren’t cheap, they wouldn’t be so widespread.) My biggest problem with ARM is what a powerful weapon it gives the statists. After all, the whole thing emerged, somewhat painfully and with some vigorous straining, from the bowels of the BBC.
5 dearieme // Aug 29, 2011 at 3:18 pm
The way to remember that that Tim invented the web is to remember that Al Gore invented the internet.
6 William M. Connolley // Aug 29, 2011 at 7:24 pm
And he did it at CERN, not in the UK.
7 Robert Dammers // Aug 30, 2011 at 2:58 pm
It is fair to call Berners-Lee the father of the consumer internet, surely?
Trouble is, all this discussion revolves around economic nationalism, the most revolting sort. The godfather of ARM (which powers just about every smartphone on the planet) is Hermann Hauser who, though born in Vienna, considers himself at least a citizen of Cambridge. The great thing about his achievement is that he knew that you don’t want to own the whole process if you really want to make a difference. So TI, Motorola and Intel all license ARM technology. That makes ARM smaller than Apple, but staggeringly influential.
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