Avner7

Well said. India would be a good example of hole diggers.

If software engineers were oil, India produces the most but unlike China you don't see them producing a Baidu, Alibaba, HTC, Lenovo, Tencent etc. Like you say they have given away their oil to the West by being laissez-faire in IT. It's why there are no Jack Ma, Pony Ma type recognizable names out of India. Instead you see a Nadella and Pichai emerge in the US.

But the same country has done the opposite with its pharma/generic drug sector by being pragmatically protectionist. It's no surprise that some of the richest people in India are now from the pharma sector, which is producing much more sustainable jobs than its IT sector is.

Things change. No one expected Mandela to become President when he got arrested.

Let's just wait for the next major data breach or data leak.

Just look at whats going on with Bangladesh's central bank. If they can't protect their data, hard to imagine the rest of the developing world being in a better of position.

Accumulators of data in the west, sitting in ivory towers, disconnected from ground realities, are setting all kinds of precedents just waiting to breakdown elsewhere.