Word: teche
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...tell you, it's hard to keep a stiff upper lip these days. First my high-tech dot-com portfolio plummets. Then it turns out that my beloved cell phone may be zapping my delicate cranium with radioactive waves. And now, to top it all off, the Prozac that keeps me from murdering my coworkers is under attack, this time by recently unemployed talk therapists. It's as if everything that seemed so promising way back in the '90s has suddenly been tainted by doubt...
...countries would seem less likely to succeed in the modern world of globalization, free trade and high-tech, speed-of-light capitalism than France. Widely caricatured as the home of the five-week vacation, the 35-hour workweek and the crippling public-sector strike, this overcentralized, overtaxed, state-heavy, tradition-bound, protectionist and perversely self-satisfied nation could not possibly survive in the competitive, market-driven international arena of today. Could...
Think again. A new France is taking shape at the dawn of the 21st century. Like a newborn chick pecking out of its protective shell, the fledgling is only partly visible--a beak here, a claw there--but already it has begun to reveal a dynamic, high-tech nation in which the old state-controlled system will give way to a more decentralized, privatized and entrepreneurial society. Says former Socialist Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn: "We're becoming a country like any other...
...aspect of the French renaissance is the rapid development of the New Economy. France was slower off the mark to embrace the digital revolution than the U.S. and some of its European neighbors, but the number of Internet connections has increased fivefold since 1997, and the financing of high-tech start-ups has tripled in the past year. Says Jacques Attali, a former economic adviser to President Mitterrand: "Two years ago, there was less than $100 million available for start-ups. Now it's nearly $2 billion." Among the new companies that are becoming household names in France: Fi System...
...Research and development is somewhat of a misnomer in Japan," says Robert Lewis, former associate director of the Tsukuba Research Consortium, a hub of high-tech companies in central Japan. "Most of the money goes to improving an existing product, not to basic research." Even when an inventor comes up with a hot product, the country's strong ethic of subordination of individuals to groups holds sway. Take the case of Aki Komikado, an unassuming sales-and-marketing employee who invented the Tamagotchi digital pet in 1996. The toy craze earned her employer, Bandai, $350 million, but Komikado didn...