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Why Google Doesn’t Have a Research Lab

technologyreview.com

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Re: Why Google Doesn’t Have a Research Lab

#21

Post by seanmcdirmid »

yeukhon wrote: post #17
pavanky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can not say that is always true. Microsoft is a software engineering company as well, but they do have a dedicated R&D team and offices.

Just because MS has a separated division doesn't mean Google has to follow. A lot of the google come out as both product and paper. That's already a research lab. Why do we bother to discuss this in the first place? I really don't see any difference in having a dedicated research lab and a place where research and products are mixed together, true a lot of employees at google don't publish papers and they do boring w…

MS didn't start that trend. Many companies used to have research divisions, large ones even...HP, Xerox, DEC, intel, Sun, IBM, even Apple had something. That is almost gone or rapidly shrinking...

Re: Why Google Doesn’t Have a Research Lab

#23

Post by lnanek2 »

marincounty wrote: post #11

Working at Google sounds like a Fun time, where you can explore your inner child--and learn how to make money on ads. I know all the Google employees are geniuses, but a genius without the right guidance(Scientitists--who could care less about advertising, just the scientific method) might end up just doing what Google rewards them for--making money. I applaud Google for letting us use their API's, but I feel restric…

Google is definitely moving the direction of Twitter with their APIs. They are becoming very locked down.

In the recent Android Wear release, for example, notifications have always supported a thing called RemoteViews - a way to put buttons and the like in a remote process like a widget and a notification. Android Wear intentionally strips out everything but text and icon, however. I wish we still had the old Google who would have let us have powerful APIs and said, well, users will rate up apps that do or don't do good things. Proof by data.

Instead we have another Twitter. I hope they don't start having bots analyze all the API users and kill ones due to robotic misclassification like happened to many of my Twitter API apps. Or user token limitations like killed so many more Twitter apps, geh. I guess they do do both already, though. If I open a bunch of tabs in Google Groups quickly, I get banned because they think I'm a robot. My Google Apps for business accounts got made non-free and charged for each user now...

Re: Why Google Doesn’t Have a Research Lab

#25

Post by gsg »

z3phyr wrote: post #18

Off topic: Can anyone list ongoing software based research projects, that are critically interesting, preferably in the sphere of compiler design, low level system software or high performance computing?

In terms of compiler design, Graal/Truffle springs to mind.

Re: Why Google Doesn’t Have a Research Lab

#26

Post by yeukhon »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #21
yeukhon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because MS has a separated division doesn't mean Google has to follow. A lot of the google come out as both product and paper. That's already a research lab. Why do we bother to discuss this in the first place? I really don't see any difference in having a dedicated research lab and a place where research and products are mixed together, true a lot of employees at google don't publish papers and they do boring w…

MS didn't start that trend. Many companies used to have research divisions, large ones even...HP, Xerox, DEC, intel, Sun, IBM, even Apple had something. That is almost gone or rapidly shrinking...

I don't mean to disrespect these companies, but they are much older than Google. It seems like from the sart Google didn't care about the division. They knew they always have some "research" going on. Maybe founders' background was the founding culture.

Re: Why Google Doesn’t Have a Research Lab

#27

Post by NamTaf »

hendzen wrote: post #3
NamTaf wrote: post #2

What's Google X if not a research lab?

A playground for extremely smart people they don't want their competitors to hire.

The article might describe it as a 'product development group' but really that's just a lab for engineers rather than scientists. It's not like Los Alamos where it was science-centric research, rather it's more like PARC or what Stark Labs would be like, in that it's 'product'-centric because it's the engineering rather than scientific version of a research lab.

Re: Why Google Doesn’t Have a Research Lab

#29

Post by mathattack »

This is a big strategic question. Do you want researchers closer to the market, paid by the person whose P&L they could impact? Or further away, so they can think longer term?

Other companies go through this a lot. Procter & Gamble used to have centralized research. To improve time to market, they decentralized research, and had them report to business unit heads. This was great for singles, but when they wanted more home runs and cross-category innovation, they decentralized again.

One can look at Xerox PARC as the penultimate example of the dangers of isolated innovation labs. They created the technology that everyone else monetized. AT&T struggled with this somewhat too.

Re: Why Google Doesn’t Have a Research Lab

#30

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

jestinjoy1 wrote: post #5

Then why they have this: http://research.google.com/ ``Research at Google is unique. Because so much of what we do hasn't been done before, the lines between research and development are often very blurred. ''

> Research at Google is unique. Because so much of what we do hasn't been done before...

How is that any different from regular research?

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