ABSTRACT
Australia represents an anomaly in the world of the IT industry. It has a small but high-income population, a complex set of business functions and a broad array of international connections. Its telecommunication systems match world standards. It has a large university and government research infrastructure, some of which has been involved in IT-related concerns, recently seen in a significant invention of a ‘peer-to-peer wireless LAN’ in 1996, which is now installed on most laptops (Mullin 2012; US Patent Office 1996). However, its IT industry, both hardware and software, has long been dependent upon overseas suppliers. It has not been able to replicate the experience of the small countries that have attracted research attention in recent years (notably Israel and Ireland). That outcome can be traced in part to the small role that the electro-mechanical technologies, which underpinned the evolution and development of the IT industry, have played in Australian manufacturing. That limited the potential for IT machine construction in Australia; accordingly, from an early stage, the machines needed to run IT functions were imported. As a result, the Australian IT sector came to rely on multinational corporation (MNC) manufacturers from the United States, Europe and Japan. Following this set of connections, foreign MNCs also became the main source of supply of software.
