This and Quaero will serve as valuable lessons for the governments that sponsored them. You can compete with Boeing this way, but not with startups.<p>I admit I'm kind of surprised they still need this lesson. You'd think they'd have already learned this from the British government's attempt to set up ICL as a competitor to the Google of its era, IBM, in 1968. Never heard of ICL? Exactly.
Sad really that so much money will go to waste. There are some amazing hacker entrepreneurs in Germany -- many of them move to the US. Giving 165 teams $1m would have resulted in at least one billion dollar company (and probably more like 20) even with incompetent decision-making.