IBM and the Limits of Transferable Tech Expertise Link

Roche is pulling out of the IBM project for a super DNA sequencer. Here’s a quick review on In The Pipeline:

Tech companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google actually have dismal records of moving into medicine. Biology is simply not like semiconductors or software engineering, even when it involves semiconductors or software engineering

I love Derek’s perspective on this:

One of the big mistakes that people make is in thinking that “technology” is a single category of transferrable expertise. That’s closely tied to another big (and common) mistake, that of thinking that the progress in computing power and electronics in general is the way that all technological progress works.