Opinion: Not invented here

News out today that banks and other financial houses aren’t too keen on local innovations in technology should come as no surprise.

They’d rather buy something that’s already being used by other people overseas, even if the technology actually came from here in the first place.

But they’re not alone in this techno-cringe. Our governments are just as bad at avoiding the local crowd in favour of the flavour-of-the-month from over there.

Some years back, a local surveyor working with a local hotshot programmer worked out a way to make use of GPS systems to improve the accuracy of land surveys and tie it into the existing accepted methodology.

But the various state governments wouldn’t have a bar of it, except for the Northern Territory where the vast distances involved made the government more open to cost savings via improved accuracy and the associated reduction in repeat surveys.

So the company headed off overseas and found ready markets for their products in Texas, USA, which has a similar problem to our own Never Never – large tracts of land with ill-defined boundaries, which are expensive to survey the old way.

However, it wasn’t long before their US office started getting expressions of interest requests from … Australia!

The very same local and state governments which wouldn’t talk to them before, were happy to talk to their US office. They didn’t bother to take offence; they just charged them extra for the long-distance support contract!

Which is probably what local software developers should do as a matter of course, even if they never sell a single copy overseas. Just open a branch in the USA or Europe and charge the local boofheads double for being so dismissive of the capabilities of our local talent in the first place.

Serves ‘em right.