Is it insane to imagine that in 50-100 years the tech infrastructure in what is now the developing world could leapfrog the West due to this sort of thing?
Very interesting point. I'm from Nigeria and I've witnessed how technology cycles tend to work here.
In America and the West, the technology markets are efficient enough for incremental innovation to be viable enough for a new product. That's not the case in Africa (I can only speak for Africa, not the developing world).
We don't innovate incrementally but we take massive leaps between commoditized technology. we need to build a stronger internet backbone that will give developers an active Internet market to cheaply test new products. it will be difficult for us to incrementally innovate otherwise.
The west has a problem due to the oligopolies of the behemoths that control infrastructure. It is the reason for example why the US ranks low in broadband speeds.
That's more a problem for the US than the west in general. EU nations are more likely to use regulation to force large telecom companies to allow smaller competitors access to their infrastructure.
