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The death of corporate research labs

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Re: The death of corporate research labs

#181

Post by CWuestefeld »

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…

Further, they're assuming causality in the direction of a decline in corporate R&D causing the rise of (generally government-supported) university research. But I don't see them providing support for that assumption.

Could it be the other way around? That government-supported research in the universities had (at least to some degree) the effect of crowding-out the corporate labs? I mean, if the government is going to foot the bill, then why would I want to spend my own money on it?

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#182

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#183

Post by enitihas »

pharke wrote: post #177
enitihas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. It is far more likely that YouTube will go bankrupt, since running a free video service where videos are almost infinite and cache hits much lower is very costly. Couple that with all the other advantages of being with Google like access to talent and infra, I don't see YouTube surviving with Google. It's possib…

Netflix made it and proved a market for paid streaming services. Google has bungled this again and again and is currently in the middle of pitting its ad revenue against its top content creators which will only wind up killing both. They've already demolished their recommendation algorithm in favour of just showing repeats of what you just watched so they can cover their ass. Creators are still using 3rd party servic…

Netflix and YouTube are not even remotely comparable. The vast majority of Netflix traffic can fit into hardware appliances installed on ISPs, or in the cache of Netflix DCs, since the tail is very small. Plus Netflix is very expensive outside of the developed world in terms of PPP, whereas YouTube is free for even the poorest.

They have got problems, yes , but there is far too much good content on youtube with a very very long tail. In lockdown, I have tried almost dozens of different cooking channels for different things. It is the magic of YouTube that so many people are able to take their content to so many viewers seamlessly at no cost or loss of convenience to them.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#184

Post by nravic »

stainforth wrote: post #171
mmmBacon wrote: post #170

I’m not sure about the premise of the article but I do concur that startups have been largely unable to develop new technology and commercialize it until relatively recently. During the 2000’s if you were doing a “hard” tech company, investors did not have the patience to invest in these companies and allow them to grow. I worked at several of these startups, many with big VC names you’d recognize and they killed the…

We could also embrace the idea of government being the investor of first resort, and not leave it to the whims of VC. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/business/mariana-mazzucat...

If you're looking at aerospace/defense startups, this is usually the case.

It's not unheard of for them to employ people who's primary role is grant writing to try and get (for example) SBIR funding

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#185

Post by Kye »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #139
enitihas wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, startups aren't going to magically make things cheaper than YouTube. So if any startups arise, they would follow a paid model most likely. Now that might be fantastic depending on where you come from. If you have disposable income, it is a huge win to have a non ad supported video platform which might even be more privacy protecting. If you are a poor kid using YouTube to watch MIT OCW and khan academy and innu…

If you are a poor kid, you upload your interpretation of a Bach piece and get slammed by an injust, extralegal pseudo-copyright mechanism, that’s in essence an attack on human culture.. MIT and Khan Academy could easily host their content using BitTorrent and reduce their bandwidth usage by 95% ( https://nrkbeta.no/2008/03/02/thoughts-on-bittorrent-distrib... )

That's basically what PeerTube tries to do. It doesn't work well in practice for most people and organizations that try it because most videos only have 0-1 watchers at a time.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#186

Post by [deleted] »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #150
sumedh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. Is Youtube even profitable? Doesn't Google make 90%+ revenue from ads?

Youtube’s main value is it’s market dominance. That’s why it’s so terrible to use, there’s no competitive incentive to actually improve the user aspects of the service (the advertisers are a COMPLETELY different ballgame tho), they already own the video space and have google/alphabet’s financial muscle to keep competitors away.

[deleted]

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#187

Post by kerkeslager »

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…

> I think we also overrate the significance of the corporate labs. There are not a lot of successful examples where the host company actually profited from the invention. Just a lot that bungled them or prematurely killed them (like when AT&T almost invented the internet). Or snuck out accidentally (like the Xerox Alto).

Only on HN would someone argue that we've overrated the significance of the invention of GUIs because it didn't make the company that invented it enough money.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#188

Post by nl »

enitihas wrote: post #128
_8j50 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. It is far more likely that YouTube will go bankrupt, since running a free video service where videos are almost infinite and cache hits much lower is very costly. Couple that with all the other advantages of being with Google like access to talent and infra, I don't see YouTube surviving with Google. It's possib…

Google makes a $15B a year from YouTube.

That pays for a lot of storage. And storage is very cheap at that scale.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#189

Post by mattkrause »

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.

A few do.

- There are three Allen Institutes (Brain Science, Cell Science, and AI), funded by Microsoft's Paul Allen in Seattle.

- The Gates Foundation (also funded by Microsoft, I guess) funds research, though mostly at existing institutes.

- The Howard Hughes Memorial Institute funds a bunch of research at its Janelia Farms Campus, plus provides lavish support investigators at universities.

- Eli and Ethyl Broad put up about $700M to endow the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT.

- The Michael J Fox foundation funds a lot of Parkinson's Disease research.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#190

Post by ISL »

scarface74 wrote: post #113
netcan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good points. I think we (I, maybe) default to the mistake of thinking in terms of "one big systemic explanation." Ultimately, something like investment in or success at innovation doesn't follow strict rules. The factors that go into it tend to be local. Any practicable "Theory of Innovation" is likely to be true locally, at best. A few years back Neil Degrasse Tyson, advocating for a re-funding of the NASA spac…

Is the Space Shuttle really a great example? Two of the five exploded killing people and it ended up being more expensive and less efficient than the non reusable Russian equivalent. https://gizmodo.com/the-space-shuttle-was-a-beautiful-but-te...

There were 135 Shuttle missions flown. Two ended in disaster.

There is a huge difference between a 1.4% failure rate and a 40% failure rate.

NASA got a whole lot of science done with those missions.

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