Once got to hear the tax director of Cisco give a talk about Silicon Valley &quot;innovation.&quot;  He was from Pittsburgh, and used to work for Detroit (not sure which company).<p>In a nutshell, his talk came down to this:
Every business innovation that Silicon Valley thinks it created, Detroit thought of first, decades ago, and implemented, decades ago, and moved on, decades ago.<p>Vertical integration used to be a big thing in the automobile world; at one point everything was done in house.  Once they began standardizing assemblies and other parts, they began farming out parts to external suppliers because there was no reason for them to control every aspect of the manufacturing process; it was cheaper to let one or more external suppliers handle that.<p>Everything old is new again.