FEATURE: "Innovation Interrupted: During the last decade, U.S. innovation has failed to realize its promise--and that may help explain America's economic woes," by Michael Mandel, BusinessWeek, 15 June 2009.

ALMOST ON THE NEXT FRICKIN' PAGE IN THE SAME ISSUE!!: "Cloud Computing's Big Bag For Business," by Steve Hamm, BusinessWeek, 15 June 2009.

First piece with a good but depressing list of "disappointments," to include: cancer treatments, cloning, fuel-cell-powered cars, gene therapy, improved drug development, miniaturized silicon-based machines, satellite-based internet, speech technology and tissue engineering.

You can't blame the bulk of those disappointments on the cheap dollar or cheap gas (like you can with the fuel-cell-powered cars).

The argument here is that, outside of high-profile IT advances, innovation in the U.S. has really lagged in the last decade.

A lot of the problems, we are told, had to do with commercialization, meaning turning the technology into products that people wanted to buy.

A big clue on this failure: we now import more high-tech than we sell abroad, something that wasn't the case in the late 1990s. College-degree earners' wages have also not risen as one would expect in a great period of innovation, nor have death rates improved much--despite all the money spent on health care.

None of these indicators are perfect captures, but they all tell us something worth hearing, says the article: we are not maintaining our edge--by any stretch of the imagination.

Still, on almost the very next page, we're told that cloud computing, seemingly pushed by American innovation, will become the next big thing (shifting us from a network-centric paradigm to one centered on people and information). Then again, we're still talking that same narrow IT sector.

We shall see . . .