Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Brexit, weak pound. A price hike is coming

Sadly, I jest. I don't know how the UK lost all of its IT companies

The UK has been pretty good at producing innovative ideas in technology but they have been really poor at marketing them and capitalising on them. I think it's because of an obsessive focus in these islands (and I include where I'm based in Ireland in this problem) on investing in banks and property instead of IT, technology and developing the industrial base.

Huge amounts of academic-led research came out of the UK and just made no money for the UK economy. I would include ARM in that btw. The company is hugely valuable in terms of IP but its revenues are fairly insignificant because its licences are obviously quite cheap and it never developed its own fabrication capabilities or products and the golden goose has been sold off to the Japanese.

There's an endless list of these companies for example, take a look at what was a very thriving British telecommunication equipment business in the 1970s that no longer exists at all. You had a pretty big telecoms equipment making business and it came up with fairly innovative products that they never seemed to be able to commercialise in a way that was exportable and just got wiped out by companies that could - Ericsson, Alcatel, Siemens, Ma Bell/Western Electric, Nokia, Fujitsu, NEC etc etc.

If you look at Germany, most of these kinds of companies aggressively protect their IP, stay off the stock market specifically to avoid being run by focus on quarterly earnings and they think long term. In France, there has historically been a lot of protection and help for 'national champions' like Alcatel etc (sadly no longer the case due to a change there too.)

In the UK, it's all been build a small company, sell it off as soon as it's worth anything and never get to the stage where the products are actually developed.

I also think that it has to be remembered that while the US has been a world leader in technology, it's by no means entirely down to free market capitalism. A huge % of R&D money came in through defence spending, space programmes and so on. The trickle down into the rest of the IT sector over there was and is vast both in terms of money and knowledge build up.

But, yeah I do think it's a pity that the UK hasn't really commercialised very much IT. It's a massive lost opportunity and really says a lot about the focus of the business environment since the 1980s.