Why Can't We Be World Players In Industry As We Are In Software?

We are in a similar way, there are just different treaty agreements applying to software for defense purposes. The software like so many other hot products are made in foreign countries with little workers rights and environmental laws. They are then allowed to be sold tariff free here in the US. Industry brings blight along with jobs. I think we should expect more from our importers. Then we would compete as you say. It could be said that the rapidity of technological obsolescence has in a sense made being an industrial nation obsolete, not only now but in the twentieth and nineteenth centuries as well. I am from the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts where giant abandoned factory buildings line the Merrimack River. It seems as though they just finally got these factories built when steam made the water turbine mill obsolete. This is as it is today; as well. We compete in software today because of the failure of IBM to do with the personal home computer in the eighties, what Apple did in the nineties. Because of this our largest computer company had virtually no home computer or software for such. The reason we seem to be competing well is because of the timing of the rise of Microsoft, not because we are developing and creating software as a nation that is superior to other countries. It is our vendors and consumers who are superior, and we can control markets as a consumer nation rather than as an industrial nation.