ABSTRACT
Revising the Model If the challenge from the United States from 1985-1987 did not result directly in a major revision of the informatics policy, the long and sometimes bitter conflict did reinforce other factors that were leading even supporters of the market reserve to rethink the policy in this third and final period of the informatics policy. The very process of discussing which elements of the policy would be least painful to sacrifice to the external pressure inevitably forced even proponents of the policy to take stock of which initiatives had been most successful and which had failed to yield significant fruit or, worse yet, had become embarrassing albatrosses that served to discredit rather than advance the goals of the policy. The same process of critical scrutiny was generated by the mounting domestic criticism of the market reserve as the policy made an impact on ever wider circles of the Brazilian economy. As early as mid-1986, the specialized press that closely monitored political and technological developments in the industry and that often served as cheerleaders for the policy began publishing articles questioning whether or not the policy was really achieving its goals.1 Drawing on interviews with many of the leading defenders of the policy in both government and national industry, they expressed particular concern that the market reserve was benefiting national capital but was not really contributing much to national technological development. The microcomputer industry consisted almost exclusively of clones of IBM personal computers which required little or no technological development to produce, using software most often smuggled or illegally copied. The major companies that were engaged in serious research and development efforts in all segments of the national industry often found themselves at a competitive disadvantage with respect to other companies willing to engage in smuggling of components or copies of foreign technology. The government was criticized for being too slow to live up to its promise to provide 2 percent of the GNP for technological research and development. In early 1987, one of the architects of the 1984 Informatics Law, Colonel Edison Dytz, went further still and began to make harsh criticisms of the policy of the New Republic and even of his own militant defense of the market reserve during his stint as Secretary of SEI in the Figueiredo government. Colonel Dytz
had started up his own computer consulting firm after leaving SEI and, from the viewpoint of the private sector, became convinced that nothing really solid was being constructed on the foundation that the market reserve had established:
We aren’t figuring out how to carry the process forward. We know how to do politics, how to make speeches, spread the ideology in the streets, mobilize the Congress, but we don’t know how to build the process.2
