The death of corporate research labs • Hacker News Board

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#241

Post by nl » Fri, May 22, 2020, 12:21 AM UTC

sumedh wrote: post #123

_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. Is Youtube even profitable? Doesn't Google make 90%+ revenue from ads?

> Is Youtube even profitable?

Yes, extremely[1].

Google (and most large bandwidth users) doesn't pay for bandwidth because they have peering agreements. Storage is cheap.

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

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#242

Post by sumedh » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:06 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #241

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?

> Is Youtube even profitable? Yes, extremely[1]. Google (and most large bandwidth users) doesn't pay for bandwidth because they have peering agreements. Storage is cheap. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

You link does not say if it's profitable.

Revenue != Profit.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#243

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:10 AM UTC

MarcellusDrum wrote: post #75

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a school of thought that CEOs don’t matter, or matter much less than we might have imagined. Further reading: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ceos+dont+matter&t=h_&ia=web

Did you just link a DuckDuckGo search query and call it "Further Reading"? We know how to search, thank you very much. If you want to help us, you can link a specific book/article, and call that further reading.

Ah, right, yeah, fair point. My apologies.

I vaguely recall reading something on HN a while back, but also didn’t want to get accused here of linking to a biased source as I’m not real familiar with the leanings or any of the ones I found in that search.

Bit lazy, but had my reasons. Will try to do better next time.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#244

Post by ramraj07 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:31 AM UTC

t_serpico wrote: post #149

ramraj07 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the context, but I suppose I just couldn't pass up on the poetic phrasing of "selling lipstick" a la Steve Jobs' "selling sugar water" phrase. Point still stands though. Even most of my PhD friends often lack fundamental understanding of how biology works, and I find it hard to believe an MBA can ever catch up no matter how much training they get. I'd argue that in general it also shows - biotechs run by s…

You don't need to have a deep understanding of biology to have a decent grasp of drug development. You're operating at a higher level of abstraction. You could argue such a CEO wouldn't be able to independently gauge the value of a new innovative medicine or approach, but that's where the CSO and others come into play.

The issue is, what if the CSO is actually not competent? Can you tell if they're bullshitting or not? What if they are competent but giving incorrect advice because it's their pet project and invalidating it now means they look bad? How can you tell?

In the end, I personally believe that the CEO needs to know enough of the underlying technology that their company is working on to smell bullshit. Otherwise his execs have a very high likelihood of taking them for granted. Ive seen it happen on a smaller scale repeatedly in my lab. If our professors are not well versed in one field of science, the postdocs and students will take advantage of it in every corner.

This is especially true in biology. It doesn't matter how good your nanoparticle drug is, if you don't know that there are fundamental problems with immune recognition, half life, biodistrubution and non-specific binding, you would not know not to invest further. This evaluation is not something a CEO should outsource to another C level exec.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#245

Post by vulcan01 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 3:18 AM 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…

On the other hand, people complain about Apple "sherlocking" apps when they release Sidecar for example. By your logic,

> they couldn't be creative and patient enough to compete with youtube so they gulp up YouTube

So what can they do? If they had launched "Google Videos" they would have surely been accused of squashing small companies... What option do they have?

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#246

Post by tellarin » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:43 AM UTC

netcan wrote: post #97

elcritch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think monopolies were inherently progress limiting, but as you point out it's a mixed bag. Bell labs was an amazing center of innovation even as AT&T stifled the telephone market. Not sure corporate labs could exist today with the self-defeating (and legally incorrect notion) that the primary duty of a public company is to make money for shareholders. That philosophy today would/will prevent large companies…

Ultimately, a lot depends on individuals. Incentives, systems, and such can make things common or uncommon, but innovation tends to be uncommon anyway. Google was founded, and mostly run, by people with a pretty broad academic interest in science and technology. Pioneering ai breakthroughs is what they wanted and they find ways to make it logical for google to do. Both the existence and the nature of their R&D reflec…

Microsoft Research is one of the biggest and most well known industry research labs and it's been around since 1991, so I don't think the comparison to Apple applies.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#247

Post by fomine3 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:45 AM UTC

netcan wrote: post #97

elcritch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think monopolies were inherently progress limiting, but as you point out it's a mixed bag. Bell labs was an amazing center of innovation even as AT&T stifled the telephone market. Not sure corporate labs could exist today with the self-defeating (and legally incorrect notion) that the primary duty of a public company is to make money for shareholders. That philosophy today would/will prevent large companies…

Ultimately, a lot depends on individuals. Incentives, systems, and such can make things common or uncommon, but innovation tends to be uncommon anyway. Google was founded, and mostly run, by people with a pretty broad academic interest in science and technology. Pioneering ai breakthroughs is what they wanted and they find ways to make it logical for google to do. Both the existence and the nature of their R&D reflec…

Don't you evaluate Microsoft Research?

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#248

Post by thu2111 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

anchpop wrote: post #236

thu2111 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used to agree.

These days I think there's a lot of wishful thinking along these lines, as if nobody would have noticed without Haskell that re-using lots of global variables leads to frequent bugs. C++ got the const keyword in 1985, the same year Haskell was born. Templates were proposed in 1986. And would nobody have developed the notion of first-class functions without academic PL research? Given that even C has the notion of function pointers, it's hard to argue that.

Rust is hardly related to Haskell. If there's a shadow it's a very small one. Rust's primary research idea is adding linear types to an imperative type system. There's no lazyness, it's not pure, the syntax is obviously C-based and not ML/Haskell based. The similarities to C++ are much stronger than the similarities to Haskell.

When I look at the huge quantity of taxpayer money sunk into this line of programming languages, and how much impact it's had, I can't really support it. Academia/Haskell supporters like to lay claim to ideas and argue they "came" from academic PL research, but when you look into the histories and timelines that's just clearly not true. The ideas were either already in development a long time ago, or they were trivial and easily thought of.

Meanwhile, like I said - lazyness is now a dead end. I remember one of my CS lecturers who worked on Haskell-related DT research when I was an undergrad. He sang the praises of lazyness, how much better it made everything. They don't think that anymore and new son-of-Haskell langs don't have it. That entire line of PL theory was born, lived and died entirely within the taxpayer funded public sector.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#249

Post by thatcat » Fri, May 22, 2020, 8:24 AM UTC

partyboat1586 wrote: post #86

kalleboo wrote: post #80

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. 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…

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.

Apple just acquired Dark sky weather and turn off the api, website, and android app. They look like a bunch of lazy dicks who can't be bothered to write their own weather app to me.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#250

Post by nl » Fri, May 22, 2020, 12:11 PM UTC

sumedh wrote: post #242

nl wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Youtube even profitable? Yes, extremely[1]. Google (and most large bandwidth users) doesn't pay for bandwidth because they have peering agreements. Storage is cheap. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

You link does not say if it's profitable. Revenue != Profit.

Agreed.

Hence my comments pointing out that the things that most people seem to think stop YouTube from being profitable (bandwidth and storage) aren't really factors for Google.