watertank: (Default)
i would go out on a limb and suggest that the americans invented mass consumer credit, which lead to the information and communications revolution.
watertank: (Default)
most profound constitutional consequences. First, in order to carry out his much more burdensome civil and military duties, the monarch, after a painful but vain struggle, had been forced to call parliaments annually. Secondly because of the state's need to supplement taxes regularly and substantially with various forms of short-, medium- and long-term borrowing, the state had been forced to take into account the views and interests of the moneyed classes and the nature of the institutions which its borrowing had very largely brought into being.
...
Another aspect of the financial revolution has in general been overlooked. It was not simply that the monarch had to borrow that limited his power. When paper money began to exceed metallic money the power of the royal purse became thereafter permanently, irreversibly and progressively diluted. The Royal Mint had always been a main .source as well as a symbol of royal power. Money creation had always been the undoubted and exclusive prerogative of the kin~, As recently as 1630 Charles I had shown how to gain independence of Parliament, at least for a time, by bringing Spanish bullion to his mint. But those days were gone for ever as soon as money could be created independently of the monarch, and even of the monarch as advised by his ministers.
A History of Money, by Glyn Davies. U of Wales Press. 1994. p.280-1.


Loss of a control point of the third type.
cf MS vs IBM; GOOG vs YHOO.
ATT vs AAPL?
watertank: (Default)
Another example of the difference between invention and innovation:

1. invention, i.e. coming up with the original idea:
The accepted inventor of the bank credit card was John Biggins at the Flatbush National Bank of Brooklyn in New York. The year, 1946. Mr Biggins developed the "Charge-It" program in which local merchants who accepted the card would deposit sales slips into the bank and the bank billed the customer.

2. innovation, i.e. scaling/diffusing and monetizing the initial solution:
1958
Bank of America, based in San Francisco, California, issues BankAmericard. With the state of California as its market, the card is an early success, and it is the first “revolving-credit” card with universal merchant acceptance, allowing cardholders the option of paying their account balance in installments with a monthly finance charge applied to the remaining balance.
1976
BankAmericard changes its name to Visa, a simple, memorable name with an international flavor that is pronounced the same way in almost every language.

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