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The death of corporate research labs

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Re: The death of corporate research labs

#221

Post by cannabis_sam »

Kye wrote: post #185
cannabis_sam wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, exactly. Because they have to compete with a behemoth subsidized by an invasive advertising company..

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#222

Post by thu2111 »

glangdale wrote: post #3

I have often found it baffling that tech giants, with near unlimited resources to fund all sorts of things, don't establish these kinds of labs. I'm aware that there are many things called something like "{Google, Facebook, Twitter, ...} Labs" but from what I understand they are significantly different from the corporate research labs of old.

The Google model is better though, in my view. The problem with the older style "lab" approach, typified by Microsoft Research, is that it basically recreates academia inside a company. There's then often huge difficulties integrating resource output into actual products. MSR does OK but is still quite notorious for producing long term expensive research projects that never get integrated into any product (Singularity/Midori being perhaps the most famous), whereas the Google model doesn't have that problem. Google has an extraordinary high rate of incorporation of research ideas into products.

This is better for a lot of reasons, obviously, it makes it easier to justify funding the projects. But it also ensures that the researchers truly understand the nature of the problem they're solving. Seeing actual translation queries on Google Translate helps direct the next piece of MT research towards what kind of things people really use the tech for. Building actual big data systems helps train the researchers in how to work with huge data sets and puts them on research paths they otherwise would have been unable to explore.

Basically it recognises that a hard division between research and practice doesn't really make sense when working at the cutting edge of technology. You want the constant feedback from real world practice to guide the theory.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#223

Post by ncmncm »

The latitude offered researchers at the labs is missed, but the main corporate role of labs was to draw in and divert the attention of the most innovative researchers from activities that might upset markets. Innovative results were collected, patented and systematically shelved.

Thus, RISC was developed at IBM in the '60s (the 801) and shelved until the '90s, as it would have outperformed the 360/370 series. Xerox PARC created the key components of modern personal computing, but Xerox management saw no reason to bring any of it to market.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#224

Post by scrollbar »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #221
Kye wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, exactly. Because they have to compete with a behemoth subsidized by an invasive advertising company..

Thanks @cannabis_sam, never thought of this but yes absolutely. The tech is slowly getting there... but innovation would speed up a lot more if there was a significant enough pain (and therefore significant enough upside).

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#225

Post by marcosdumay »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #96
the_gipsy wrote: post #39

Have they ever been alive, though? They seem more of a PR stunt, to show shareholders that the company is invested in the future. In my country, if you land a job in such a lab, you know you can bullshit around and play with with some stuff. But nothing will ever come out of it. For profit, the corporation will acquire some product or startup. If you really want to innovate freely, found your own startup. With the ad…

Bell Labs basically re-invented electricity. The invention of the transistor was one of the most important inventions in history, on the scale of the dynamo, gunpowder, or fucking metal tools.

To be fair, there were plenty of people working into creating a transistor, so if Bell Labs weren't there, somebody else would have done it. It is not even clear that they were really the first.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#226

Post by andrewla »

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…

I agree that there is no _free_ way of solving the YouTube problem. As for cheapness? We don't yet know what the space looks like because YouTube kills off its competitors by undercutting them preemptively. If we hadn't had YouTube all these years, by now there's at least a possibility that other approaches (ad-driven, subscription-driven, etc.) would have been explored for low-cost user-generated content, and we'd have a better idea of what the actual cost is, as opposed to this bifurcated monopoly between the networks providing professionally-produced content (including burgeoning streaming services) and YouTube capturing the remaining content.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#228

Post by makapuf »

andrewla wrote: post #226
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…

I agree that there is no _free_ way of solving the YouTube problem. As for cheapness? We don't yet know what the space looks like because YouTube kills off its competitors by undercutting them preemptively. If we hadn't had YouTube all these years, by now there's at least a possibility that other approaches (ad-driven, subscription-driven, etc.) would have been explored for low-cost user-generated content, and we'd h…

It seems a competitor like Dailymotion was able to survive on its own, bar YouTube competition. I m not sure its viable with it, but without google it seemed profitable.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#229

Post by cannabis_sam »

scrollbar wrote: post #224
cannabis_sam wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. Because they have to compete with a behemoth subsidized by an invasive advertising company..

Thanks @cannabis_sam, never thought of this but yes absolutely. The tech is slowly getting there... but innovation would speed up a lot more if there was a significant enough pain (and therefore significant enough upside).

What are you talking about?

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#230

Post by bsder »

jdmichal wrote: post #159
scarface74 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Umm, this is exactly the problem the article talks about.

The fact that you had to pay obeisance to Apple to get access to private APIs and data is a failure of the anti-trust mechanisms.

The fact that Apple could just buy up Siri without anti-trust mechanisms kicking in meant they can just sit in their castle and let somebody else do the hard work.

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