While Al Gore may be the self proclaimed creator of the Internet, Ronald Reagan is why Google is putting a research lab in Poland.
Why Google Put a Research Lab in Poland
Christian Science Monitor (03/13/07) Woodard, Colin
Western companies are beginning to notice the value of moving operations to Eastern Europe, where the schools are producing many computer scientists that will work for one-third of the pay of those in Western Europe. The curriculum in many former Soviet-bloc countries is heavily grounded in math, given the former Soviet Union's emphasis on industrial and military production. IBM, Google, and Motorola have all recently opened research labs in Krakow, Poland. "Investment in universities and research in important areas will attract students to these areas, says Google's Kannan Pasupathy. "It's a nice circle which ultimately benefits everybody."
Recall that it was an incident involving Toshiba and the Soviet Union that forced the Reagan administration to use the Combat Command [COCOM] to enforced an international embargo of sensitive technology exports to the Soviet Union.
My colleagues in Krakow, who remember the embargo, tell me:
The universities may be an important factor but one thing that the author of the article is missing is that in fact probably the most important contributor to the high level of skills of Eastern-Bloc computer specialists was in fact the President Ronald Reagan who in the early eighties imposed sanctions, prohibiting the Western Bloc companies to export/share their electronic and computer technology and knowledge. We ended up with software but no manuals, operating systems with no documentations - a situation which forced the entire generation of passionate people [who] got into programming in the late 70s up to late 80s to debug, hack, investigate, figure out, study undocumented code.
And there you have why Ronald Reagan is responsible for Google putting a research lab in Poland.
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