81–90 of 256 posts
I left shortly afterwards.
I've only got one speed; sorry. Compare this to interest rate policy. This article mentions a lot of research labs shutting down in the 90s. The 90s was also when the current 30 year period of Any company that invested heavily in the future would have been a loser vs. people who worked on credit. It isn't surprising that none of the big corporations are investing in research. The investment framework levers have been…
The lower the discount rate is, the more the long term matters.
Low interest rates manifest as people starting Uber and Tesla rather than big companies finding budget for a research lab. Ford is competing with a company that doesn't feel a real need to have profit margins - that is a threat in the present. Big, cash burning machines with potential multi-billion dollar payoffs are where the credit goes and where the winners live - not boring people doing long term research in corporate labs.
It isn't like R&D is a losing proposition in this age - look at Apple's peak for example - but the resources are being directed to people who own assets or are shooting to control entire markets. Research labs aren't making companies winners.
* I'm sure there is somebody, but there won't be many.
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It's not surprising that the period that covers the invention of transistors, integrated circuits and microprocessors saw significant technological leaps. You can make the same observations about the periods when steam, gas and electric power came to market. What you're describing though is a small number of companies making significant technological leaps, not the quantity of innovation. People also argue that the i…
people argue that but it's not anywhere in the numbers (and even more importantly, in lived experience). The argument can be made that this innovation just lags the invention of the internet but that's kind of unfalsifiable and looks increasingly like rationalisation. One key difference is that inventions like the microprocessor or the steam engine are deeply fundamental. They're at the 'backend' of the chain. Intern…
I am curious what the author thinks about the same problem in pharma/biotech. On the one hand, they are kind of _forced_ to do research in one form or another to power the pipelines, so clearly corporate research is still alive there. However, given the pathetic track record the industry seems to hace, and arguably complete lack of any real innovation (almost all of the drugs in most pipelines are just antibodies or…
CEOs are usually business people. The "product" they work with is the development and sustenance of the business and shareholder value. They sometimes have domain knowledge but if they don't, the board should have access to a sufficient supply to make sound technical decisions.
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It's not being too large that forced a split up but their anti-competitive practices and positions. The regional bells still were big enough to run their own research labs. Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. The problem I think is how easy it is for large companies to acquire smaller companies. It's how they expand or enter a market, they refuse to…
> My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead. You become a cemerery of dreams and ideas. You become an IBM,HP,Xerox and AT&T. Once the damage is done it becomes nearl impossible to recover from. Would Apple be a counter-example? Multitouch, PA Semi, Siri, TouchID, etc etc lots of Apple technology was acquired but nobody lament…
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It's not being too large that forced a split up but their anti-competitive practices and positions. The regional bells still were big enough to run their own research labs. Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. The problem I think is how easy it is for large companies to acquire smaller companies. It's how they expand or enter a market, they refuse to…
> My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead. You become a cemerery of dreams and ideas. You become an IBM,HP,Xerox and AT&T. Once the damage is done it becomes nearl impossible to recover from. Would Apple be a counter-example? Multitouch, PA Semi, Siri, TouchID, etc etc lots of Apple technology was acquired but nobody lament…
Holdup. Lack of anti-trust enforcement is blamed (among other things) for the end of corporate R&D, but Monopoly breakup is exactly what killed Bell labs! 9 smaller companies weren't going to fund their own lab, and the only reason the lab existed was to find new markets to explore. In fact, nearly all of the examples of successful R&D labs came from corporations that so dominated their industry they put money into f…
Well, a lot of / most of deep machine learning breakthroughs are coming directly from research scientists at Facebook, Google, NVIDIA, (other major tech companies) or research organizations associated with them or their executives. It's difficult for academic labs to keep up, actually. Whilst modern economics and the startup model makes it easier for companies to let startups do the actual idea testing (and then buy…
That's probably more an intrinsic problem with academia (lower wages, limited career opportunities, limited resources compared to companies).
Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are the poster children for successful corporate R&D labs, but I wonder if, to some extent, they were in the right place at the right time? The advent of modern computing and digital telephony provided rich soil for impactful research. I worked for a large R&D lab a while back after completing my PhD, but the organization turned out to be completely directionless. Funding went to snake-oil sa…
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It's not being too large that forced a split up but their anti-competitive practices and positions. The regional bells still were big enough to run their own research labs. Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. The problem I think is how easy it is for large companies to acquire smaller companies. It's how they expand or enter a market, they refuse to…
Increasingly they don't even buy small companies. They just copy. Look at half of Microsoft recent activity.
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In the enlightenment you could make discoveries about lightning with a kite and a key, in your free time when you weren't working as a publisher or founding America. In 2020 you need 10,000 scientists and $9bn to build a hadron collider, and 99.9% of people won't even understand if your result is important or not. Are we less good at science now, given that we're spending far more resources for far less impact? Or ra…
The big problems in science can be solved by much smaller teams. LHC is just proving out the dominant paradigm. It’s not gonna help us understand dark matter and _that’s_ the real anomaly in the current physical understanding of the world. Crack that an you’re the next Einstein/newton or at least Planck/schrodinger/hooke. There’s plenty of room for innovation in green energy tech, housing materials, ag science, etc..…
What’s rotten exactly? Take a look at this lovely graph [0] showing the cost of solar cells going from $76.67/watt in 1977, to $0.74/watt in 2013 (the price of installation is obviously more than the cell production costs, at about $2.5-$3.5/watt today).
[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2014/09/04/solar-panel-cost-trends...