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The death of corporate research labs

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Re: The death of corporate research labs

#231

Post by azhenley »

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…

Microsoft Research has had a lot of features and products come out of it. They also publish an incredible amount of basic research.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#232

Post by scarface74 »

bsder wrote: post #230
jdmichal wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Why would I trust random third parties with the level of access that Apple has? Should Apple also allow access to the Secure Enclave by third parties?

VCs don’t invest in startups to help them build low profit “lifestyle businesses”. They fully expect them to be acquired or rarely become public. Just as an anecdote that we are all familiar with, only two YC companies have gone public — Pagerduty and Dropbox - and Dropbox is still not GAAP profitable.

If the governments takes away the ability of companies to get acquired, investments in startups will dry up and $BigTech would be the only ones with money to do research.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#233

Post by wegs »

billme wrote: post #175
wegs wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be direct: you literally failed to acknowledge my core point in response to your prior comment, that is what you’re describing is “survivor bias” — then went on in the comment I am currently responding to say a recipe is to fund, hire, cofounder, etc - the survivors. Recipe you provided was still based on survivor bias, at best an optimization based strategy — and would never double the output globally of R&D for…

To be direct: You made a nonsense statement, and now your changing your claims. Your statement was: "anyone that tells you they are able to outperform the market at scale as it relates to R&D outcomes is lying." This is a false statement.

Your question was never about doubling global output of R&D. That's not a point one can even argue meaningfully; there's no way to offer more than an opinion there.

Your question was about being "able to outperform the market at scale." It was nonsense. Plenty of people and organizations can and do outperform the market, consistently, over many decades. That's not a survivorship bias, any more than weightlifters beating the general population at lifting weights is survivorship bias, or that Stanford CS majors have stronger technical skills than the general market is survivorship bias. It's a counterexample. Survivorship bias would be there if these were one-offs (company or individual makes ONE breakthrough, at random).

I'm signing off this thread. This is dumb.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#234

Post by mrshu »

dantheman wrote: post #199

This article misses the fundamental way in research is funded. The US Government funds research through grants, and each scientist runs thier own little shop doing independent research... The problem is this isn't a directed research program. The Manhattan Project, Space Race, etc had program managers telling scientists what problems to solve and had other scientists building the architecture, identifying gaps, and r…

Thanks for sharing this point of view: it does indeed seems to be sorely missing in the article as well as in this thread.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#235

Post by scrollbar »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #229
scrollbar wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm talking about being competition to an entity like YouTube which is funded by an internet advertising behemoth. Is that what you're talking about?

YouTube can afford to offer a lot of value to the customer, much more than it would have been able to sustain by itself without the Google support.

Without offering all that value, definitionally, Youtube would not be as attractive to consumers.

Therefore consumers would be more likely to choose other alternatives like PeerTube

Therefore projects like PeerTube would have more support and therefore would develop more quickly.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#236

Post by anchpop »

thu2111 wrote: post #220
mhneu wrote: post #205

Hold on. Corporate research labs are _fundamentally different_ than academic research labs. Why? Time horizon. Companies will not fund research that has a more-than-20-year expected time to product. Usually, they won't fund things that will take more than 10 years to go from R&D to product. That's because of investment-- think about startups, what LP wants to put money in a fund for more than 20 years? On the other h…

Corporate labs do fund very long term research. Google was interested in and working on AI more or less from the early years (anyone remember Google Sets?), it's still funding fundamental AI research more than 20 years later. Now they've been funding self driving cars for more than 10 years and still do so. The reason it appears rare is because funding research on the assumption it might be useful in more than 20 yea…

> Practically the entire field of PL research was swallowed up by FP and continues to be dominated by that paradigm (e.g. dependent types), despite the vast majority of PL users being disinterested in them.

I couldn't disagree with this more. I'm biased because I really like PL research, but when I look at modern languages like Rust, Haskell's shadow is plain to see. ADTs, immutability and parametric polymorphism for instance.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#237

Post by rmrfstar »

JunkDNA wrote: post #122
rmrfstar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's revealing when the CEO of the org is not a technical person Merck's CEO is a lawyer. > they are kind of _forced_ to do research in one form or another Modern pharma companies spend more on legal and marketing than they do on R&D [1]. Valeant and Michael Pearson are emblematic of that horrifying trend. MBA types and McKinsey alums have very different priorities than most hackers/researchers/builders, and it is…

Spending more on marketing than R&D has been a favorite thing to zero in on but it's not really a useful metric. See here: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/05/23/an...

The article you linked isn't great.

It attacks a study that no one finds credible, which labeled a company's entire SG&A as "marketing" and found that "marketing" so measured was 10x R&D. It also predates the BBC link.

So, what you meant to say is "calling SG&A marketing is not really useful," which is true. But that's not what the linked BBC article did at all.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#238

Post by LatteLazy »

Research is risky, it's easy to cut for short term gains, it's very hard to quantify before POC and that makes it very very hard to justify keeping, and few Co panties are good at the whole pipeline needed to turn research into profits and research is best done by people with equity. Those are just some of the reasons that the modern world has moved to a model where small, new companies soley do research and then either sell/license it or sell themselves to bigger companies.

Drucker wrote about this in (I think) the 90s. Its actually a much more sensible way to do this work.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#239

Post by netcan »

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...

No, and it's not precisely the argument he was making. He was arguing for manned exploration generally, and large scale space projects generally. I was abbreviating, poorly as you point out.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#240

Post by nl »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #209
nl wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Cost of streaming videos is not storage, it's dominated by bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive when you can't cache videos the way Netflix does.

a) Google doesn't pay for bandwidth. They have peering agreements because of all the dark fiber they bought (https://www.lightreading.com/optical/dwdm/google-dark-fiber-...)

This isn't exclusive to Google though - most large bandwidth users have peering agreements.

b) Google does have edge caches[1]. It's true that the long tail of YouTube videos is longer than Netflix, but since Google doesn't pay for traffic (see (a)) this only affects speed, not cost.

[1] https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

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