The Google algorithm was a significant development. I've had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.
When I launched the development of the GNU system I explicitly said the purpose of developing this system is so we can use our computers and have freedom thus if you use some other free system instead but you have freedom then it's a success. It's not popularity for our code but it's success for our goal.
I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn't.
Just as characteristic perhaps is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post telegraph telephone and popular press.
The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.
Toyota was the first to put a commercial fuel cell powered car on the road and I have no doubt that Toyota will continue to be in the front lines in the development of competitive fuel cell vehicles.
The hydrogen powered car with its high fuel mileage and zero emission rate is just one example of the products under development that will help increase our energy independence.
I was criticized at some level within the Republican Party by those who say government should not be in the economic development business at all. My response is that the only country I know that doesn't have an economic development plan is Papa New Guinea.
We have in this country a federal government that increasingly is engaged in trying to determine which business which regions which industries will succeed which will not through a whole range of economic development regional development corporate subsidization programs.
A successful economic development strategy must focus on improving the skills of the area's workforce reducing the cost of doing business and making available the resources business needs to compete and thrive in today's global economy.