Nothing against research universities as good stuff does occur there, but it just seems like it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. I think it helps to have scientists and engineers closer to the problem and who don't have to spend a huge amount of their time writing grants and training grad students.
Having worked in corporate labs they really were great and it's a shame they're disappearing.
It's not only share buybacks, I would include offshoring, DEI, and a consolidation of management power as major factors in the destruction these labs. The pipeline has been so bad for so long now that it would take a miracle to get things started again.
The last org I worked at offshored the most promising work to China. Due to some high up international agreement the company had to spend $X on offshored workers so not only were they considered cheap they were considered free because the money had to be spent anyway and was coming out of someone else's budget.
I was working at a Research Org when the DEI push came through and it was a absolute disaster. A lot of projects ended their internship programs and avoided hiring in order to minimize the exposure. The bargain was always, you can have 6 seats but 50% need to be women and 50% need to be minorities, and since everyone got the push at the same time it meant that due to the intense competition for the same people you'd end up really having to scrape the bottom of the barrel. That made a lot of initiatives unviable.
I wasn't working at Yahoo Research but as I heard it was canned following a management rift. They were already bleeding talent for a while but had retained some good people that stayed out of comfort and inertia. The smart people cultivated in research orgs tend to be a competing source of power and management hates that.
I'm not really seeing how the blacks and women ruined corporate research, can you expand on that more? Are you saying they were all retarded and without enough white, Asian, and Indian men nothing could be accomplished?
Since they don't make up 50% of the pipeline the enforced restriction necessitates hiring further down the ability rank even if you are to assume that all races and all sexes have the same ability / aptitude. And it also means for every non-minority male you need a minority female and those are very hard to get.
If for instance higher ups from all companies require you to hire only whites with straight blond hair, a certain weight/size and with green eyes, you will quickly need to hire the bottom of the barrel of this group to expand your teams.
Numbers were not invented, they were tied to management bonuses, numbers lower than that negatively impacted bonuses. Inhouse counsel were much more worried about disparate impact lawsuits than race quota lawsuits. There are many reasons why I, and others like me, can't post personal anecdotes publicly.
Not absolutely everything was great before DEI, and DEI is not the only problem. I gave a number of other problems that have diminished the efficacy of research orgs.
Corporate labs have now gotten so bad that I can outcompete them as an individual which would have been much more difficult in the past.
And you can have a career track that normal people will actually want. The whole phd -> postdoc -> (maybe) tenured professor thing is such misery that I never even gave it a thought as a career.
Yeah if you go check almost any major scientific breakthrough of the past century it usually starts with "some guy was working in a corporate lab with an unlimited budget". We're stagnating as a species a lot more, but at least the shareholders got a payout for their hard work of doing literally nothing. Rent seeking at its worst.
Silly argument. Everything in gravitational physics goes back to Newton? Who cares about Convex Optimization if you do not undertand gravity? Math goes back to Euclid and the Greeks?
Mankind has consistently built upon existing knowledge. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. (Newton)"
IMHO, what we are seeing is the US was generating 50% of the world's GDP at the end of World War II. In that era it could afford to many non-economical things - Marshall Plan, funding research at universities, etc. The US is no longer the dominant economic engine. It actually has to prioritize its spending. Money spent on research is money not spent on food stamps, housing the homeless, defense.
What is never mentioned in these discussions is how much money has been spent on research that did nothing. Advanced nothing. When that is factored in, what is the ROI of university-based research?
this is silly money spent on research is always going to be better spent than the numerous misuse of tax payer dollars spent. ICE has a bigger budget than NASA and NSF combined consider this how little is science being valued. We have gained tremendously from NSF and NASA and now we are seeing that only SpaceX and maybe Rocketlab could hold a candle to China's CNSA and their private industry which is quickly going to be catching up because they have the ability to produce it in scale.
Oh no! I wonder what the US could have achieved if instead of spending 10s of billions of dollars per year, it could instead have used those to fund more trillion-dollar wars!!
What kind of person sees a claim like "No, not all major breakthroughs were done at private companies. Like the internet, for example" and immediately feels the need to tell them private companies are doing stuff?
Are you not reading the reply chains before commenting? What motivates you to interject with information that is meaningless?
The only thing I can think of is that you've voted for the people who are currently slashing the funding and have to continuously try to convince yourself it's okay.
OP said "almost any major scientific breakthrough of the past century" was done at private companies. Which is objectively not true. They transmitted that message using technology that was created by the government. That's ironic.
Your reply
> Basically all of the internet is powered by software, standards, computers, networks and storage created by companies.
Is meaningless. It's someone jumping out of the woodwork to white knight the private sector. It's weird. It doesn't change what I said or what OP said.
It doesn't make it less ironic to say "all major things were done by private companies" using a technology that wasn't invented by a private company. It's irrelevant.
> it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear.
A loss for whom? Society? Of course, and that's exactly why they don't happen anymore -- because while they were a boon for society they were a terrible bet for the company. And when a company has a choice between doing good for their bottom line or doing good for society, 100% of the time they choose their bottom line.
I mean, look at the legacy of Xerox Parc from Xerox's perspective. They invited this guy in, Steve Jobs, and he commercialized their ideas. Today Xerox is worth pennies on the dollar compared to their height, doing none of what Xerox Parc researched. Apple ate their lunch. The ROI for Xerox Parc was terrible for Xerox.
For all the amazing stuff they did, they were not rewarded by the marketplace for it, they didn't produce better products for themselves, they just did other companies' R&D.
That's where universities come in, and where they are vital. If you take them out, their role will not be filled by corporations, because corpos can't stomach the kind of dollars needed to do fundamental research. Only the government can stomach that, and if somehow the voters are convinced all this isn't worth funding, it just won't happen at any level.
This implies Xerox got no return on their research, and simply let Apple take their research, which isn't true. Rather, it was part of the investment deal they made with Apple [1]:
> Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.”
Xerox clearly undervalued the research they were producing, but it wasn't like they just gave it away entirely. Per [2] the valuation of those shares in 2018 would be $1.2 billion had they not sold them - undervalued in hindsight, but not nothing.
Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.
What I said was that it worked out a lot better for Jobs than it did Xerox, not that they didn't get anything. It certainly didn't work out how they'd hoped. And that hasn't gone unnoticed by would-be funders of future Xerox PARCs.
> Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.
I dunno, to me it feels like the people who are good at doing and investing in basic research are not the same kind of people who are good at building and investing in applications. Yes you can present a counterfactual where if only Xerox had Jobs' vision and execution everything could have been different... but chalking it up to just "they could have done it better and been successful" misses the fact that they were doing the best they could with the smartest people they could find, and still couldn't capitalize.
The corps won't stomach it anymore at the scale they formerly did, but at one point they did. It could happen again some day...just a lot would have to change.
Parc just didn't capitalize on what they had. I know the Alto was expensive, but still seems like a huge shame.
Yeah, no, the ROI on Xerox Parc was excellent for Xerox, because of the technology they _did_ successfully commercialize on their own: the laser printer. It helped Xerox to $8 billion in revenue in 1984, a level Apple didn't beat until 2006. Even Microsoft didn't beat Xerox in revenue until the year 2000, where Xerox had $19 billion in revenue. Apple didn't reach that level until 2010. So you could say that it took the iPhone to beat laser printers; the Machintosh wasn't enough.
Even if we accept that premise, it still doesn't follow that PARC-like research centers are the only or best way to achieve that outcome. PARC's remit was to invent the office of the future, not to do the typical R&D thing which would be to make incremental improvements on their current products. Laser printers are exactly an incremental improvement on their current products.
So what you're saying here is that the best thing to come out of PARC for Xerox was an incremental improvement to their existing product line that could have been proposed by a typical R&D team.
Again, not a great selling point for the ROI of PARC from Xerox's perspective.
No, the laser printer was revolutionary. Xerox' previous business was photocopiers that could only make copies of existing physical documents you'd already typed out or pasted together. The laser printer was connected directly to your mainframe and allowed customized mass printing at a speed and quality not seen before. Before the laser printer, the alternatives were dot-matrix printers, plotters, automated typewriters, all at least an order of magnitude slower than the first laser printers and only the plotter had any chance of looking nice.
Laser printers were a central part of the computerized mass-customized printing of things like insurance policies and bank statements that happened in the 70's and were definitely a revolutionary change in what kind of problem Xerox was solving for their customers.
> Xerox' previous business was photocopiers that could only make copies of existing physical documents you'd already typed out or pasted together. The laser printer was connected directly to your mainframe and allowed customized mass printing at a speed and quality not seen before.
But I'm not saying laser printers weren't a great thing, I'm saying it doesn't take setting up a research playground like PARC to get that kind of result.
Laser printers are the kind of improvement typical R&D comes up with. Xerox's customers wanted more speed and quality out of their printers, laser printers got them that. It's not exactly clear that a typical R&D wouldn't/couldn't have come up with that. Apple for instance does this kind of R&D all the time, and they're very good at it.
Xerox PARC wasn't about getting the next incremental improvement in speed and quality for printers, it was about inventing the office of the future. But the office of the future doesn't require laser printers or printers of any kind. PARC's vision was that Xerox's core business would be eliminated, and that's precisely why Xerox couldn't be the one to actually capitalize on PARC research.
> were definitely a revolutionary change
I would say going from dot matrix printers to laser printers is an incremental change; whereas something more revolutionary would be going from dot matrix printers to no printers at all because you don't need them since you have e-mail and the Internet.
