The death of corporate research labs • Hacker News Board

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#151

Post by varjag » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #147

varjag wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID-1970 would be a lot slower in the spread due to much less globalized world. The West probably would still not have experienced it, neither the Soviet Bloc due to then fresh Sino-Soviet split and heavily militarized border.

I think the Spanish flu might not agree with that assessment. Both plagues also did a pretty good job of spreading to pretty much all territories that had any form of contact at the time.

IMO the better example was 1957 Asian flu pandemic. It also started in China in December-February, but was not yet registered in the West as of May.

It also never crossed the Iron Curtain into Warsaw Pact countries.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#152

Post by theelfismike » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

take_a_breath wrote: post #146

mkl wrote: post #142

Why aren't there blue sky research labs funded by curious billionaires? Xerox PARC's key computing inventions cost a total of US$48 million in today's dollars [1]. There may not be so much big cheap low-hanging fruit now, but there is still plenty within reach. Bezos could be doing this instead of or as well as Blue Origin (which he's been funding at US$1 billion/year [2]). [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/…

Think of what the Vision Fund could have achieved with this mindset. I’d love for a billionaire to offer 18-25 year-olds, $25k for a summer to explore new projects. You could fund 1000 kids with promising projects for $25 million. If the next great innovation will start as a toy, we need to encourage people to make more toys.

I mean, isn't that what Peter Thiel is doing? Giving college age people $100k to drop out and do a startup?

https://thielfellowship.org/

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#153

Post by foobarian » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #87

mattlutze wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's difficult for academic labs to keep up, actually. That's probably more an intrinsic problem with academia (lower wages, limited career opportunities, limited resources compared to companies).

There is a spectrum of the kinds of research one might do. My advisor always used to remind me that if a team of good engineers at a big corporation can do something, it's not a good research problem to tackle for a grad student in a uni lab. So we naturally tended to more speculative/fundamental problems, which seems like a good thing - instead of trying to compete with industry labs we augment them.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#154

Post by nck4222 » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

_8j50 wrote: post #133

TheCabin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead. Not so sure about that. Maybe if you read HN a lot, but I think most users won't even notice.

Your core consumers that are foundational to your brand will always care. But more often than not if there are no alternatives it just becomes a long term disinterest in your brand. Fun example: Star wars fans and Disney aquisition.

Considering Star wars media continues to print money for Disney, and core Star wars consumers were appalled at the franchise before the acquisition (prequels), that's not the best example.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#155

Post by mkl » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

theelfismike wrote: post #152

take_a_breath wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of what the Vision Fund could have achieved with this mindset. I’d love for a billionaire to offer 18-25 year-olds, $25k for a summer to explore new projects. You could fund 1000 kids with promising projects for $25 million. If the next great innovation will start as a toy, we need to encourage people to make more toys.

I mean, isn't that what Peter Thiel is doing? Giving college age people $100k to drop out and do a startup? https://thielfellowship.org/

With a startup, there's a very strong profit motivation. With blue sky research, you're just exploring and discovering and inventing, and doing that without a strict goal of profit leads to unexpected things that wouldn't easily be found in other settings.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#156

Post by legolas2412 » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #90

rubidium wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

> We’re objectively spending more to get those than we used to need to. And that’s WITH google and scihub! Something is rotten. 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/2014/0…

Surely you see the difference between explaining what dark matter is, and making solar cells cheaper.

Which one fits your definition of important scientific question that we should answer?

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#157

Post by formercoder » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:18 PM UTC

_8j50 wrote: post #46

legitster wrote: post #34

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…

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…

Ironically, acquiring generally lowers the acquirer’s stock price in the short term.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#158

Post by crocal » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #29

Can confirm. I have seen this happen from very up close in the European research arena. The big corporate labs were either completely gutted, or severely constraint and reoriented towards very short term practicalities, basically just development centers fulfilling contract research.

Europe suckiness at R&D is well documented. I am European. It hurts.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#159

Post by jdmichal » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:28 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #111

partyboat1586 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because all the tech Apple acquired was acquired before it was a big recognisable brand. Also Apple are very good at making it look like they came up with it. Ask someone who doesn't follow the movements of big tech companies 'Who invented Siri?', 'Who invented TouchID?'etc they will say Apple.

You mention Siri as an example of Apple taking credit. Siri was on the App Store before Apple bought it and they kept the name. But honestly, who cares but geeks about what the general population thinks about who invented it?

I worked at SRI, though not on Siri. (Wish I had; they got a nice payday when it was bought.) Siri was weaker before Apple bought it, because there was only so much they could do with the public APIs. Apple buying it was the best outcome. It allowed Siri to come into its full potential, while at the same time inspiring others to make their own.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#160

Post by wegs » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

billme wrote: post #127

wegs wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no magic recipe for success in R&D — and anyone that tells you they are able to outperform the market at scale as it relates to R&D outcomes is lying. This is complete nonsense. This logic applies well to stock and bond valuation, where you have armies of traders optimizing from public information. It's a pretty frictionless market It's like telling a parent their kids can't outperform the market at scale…

What is the recipe? — (You have written a lot of words, no recipe.) Honestly, love research, would be happy to be wrong, but all I hear you saying is someone did it so it must be possible— that’s called survivor bias, it’s not a recipe and it would not double the global output of R&D for the next 10-1000 years.

There isn't a simple recipe someone can follow. A recipe is what brings you up to "industry best practices," and about where a typical business might perform.

Excellence requires focus, dedication, thinking things through from first principles, having the right people in place, etc.

The closest I can offer to a recipe is to hire a CEO / President / co-founder early on who has a track record of having R&D successes in former positions, who has a great depth of knowledge, who thinks deeply, and have them focus the organization on R&D, and to do this before the culture is set.

Of course, that's not always a winning strategy. If you do that, that same person is unlikely to have that same depth in, for example, customer engagement, negotiations, or legal.

Most hard things don't have recipes ("What's the recipe for an effective fighter jet?"). If they did have simple recipes, they usually wouldn't be hard. But that doesn't make them impossible (we have a whole fleet of effective fighter jets).