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The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

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Re: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

#11

Post by jonmrodriguez »

fest wrote: post #8
jonmrodriguez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in genetic engineering and robotics!

Re: robotics- you mean low-hanging fruit research-wise or application-wise? I'm not closely following latest research in this area but I get the feeling that most of the focus is geared towards autonomous cooperation and nano-scale. What are other directions?

Application-wise :) Mostly I'm thinking that with cheap 3D-scanning sensors and GPUs, it's finally the beginning of the era for domestic and consumer robots to be viable.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

#12

Post by Zigurd »

I'm usually on the side of pointing out the squishyness in some numbers, like US productivity and GDP. But we seem not to be in a crisis or even decline in corporate research. Microsoft and Google and, to a limited extent Facebook have taken over from IBM and Xerox and Bell Labs.

The Bell Labs business model was highly artificial, and that artificiality was used as an argument not to break up AT&T. Current structures are more sustainable.

Some ways of structuring corporate research are new: At Google, and at startups funded by Founders Fund, you will find R&D that's been selected for impact.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

#13

Post by pm90 »

michaelochurch wrote: post #10

Being in technology, you have a front-row seat to the concept of elective decline , or the idea that civilization's decline is often a collective but intentional choice, rather than the result of external stress. It seems sad, to a historian, that a great empire would "collapse" (an affair that usually happen imperceptibly over hundreds of years) but the reality is that it's the unintended product of millions of indi…

Yes, its pretty sad to see the demise of industrial labs doing more fundamental research, but this might be related to the demise of the big corporations in general. The HN community understandably hates the bigger companies for being monopolies and stifling innovation and whatnot, but there are two sides to the story. A large corporation, with bigger revenues, can think longer term, and invest in basic research so as to promote efficiency and/or develop technologies to give it a competetive edge. I believe Bell Labs was invented for this reason: the exact story escapes me, but they asked a scientist to help them out with one problem, and then kinda realised it might not be a bad idea to have a bunch of these scientists around, just doing their research, to perhaps be occasionally available to help the engineers with the problems they face.

I do see a lot more cooperation between the Industry and University though. And as we enter an era of smaller corporations, the burden of industrial research might shift to consulting/academic sponsorship programs instead.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

#14

Post by SamReidHughes »

michaelochurch wrote: post #10

Being in technology, you have a front-row seat to the concept of elective decline , or the idea that civilization's decline is often a collective but intentional choice, rather than the result of external stress. It seems sad, to a historian, that a great empire would "collapse" (an affair that usually happen imperceptibly over hundreds of years) but the reality is that it's the unintended product of millions of indi…

What do you mean by a decline in scientific progress? The rate at which science is done? Per capita? Do you perceive some kind of long-term trend? Spending per capita on R&D by the U.S. was moving upwards last I checked, maybe that was just in the Bush administration, but I'm missing the trendline here. And what sort of oh-so-important research do you think we're missing out on that could be better parallelized with more funding?

What does "civilization" have to do with some trend in U.S. science funding, that probably doesn't exist? If you think the U.S. is in technological decline... how come oil production has drastically increased? Why are cars so much safer now? If people don't want to spend money on science and technology, why do we spend more on education than any other nation? Why should we infer anything from state legislatures' funding of universities, from which the best and brightest move out of state, which make more sense to fund nationally?

I'm glad you've heard of words like "civilization," "civilized," "hoi polloi," and "fucking." Next time, try saying reality-based things with them instead of antiplatitudes pulled from thin-air.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

#16

Post by DrDimension »

anonetal wrote: post #9
greggarious wrote: post #2

This article seems a bit hyperbolic. Yes, the Silicon Valley branch has shut down, but MSR's main office in Washington is still open and doing great research. It's probably the best industrial lab that's still running. I also have interned at PARC (no longer "Xerox PARC", but still kicking). I was given remarkable freedom both by my direct supervisor and the division manager. Down the road, HP labs was still going (t…

I agree that MSR is probably the best CS industrial lab out there right now, but I think Moshe's point is that even the rest of the MSR is probably a bit wary right now given what (and how it) happened to MSR SV. I don't think HP, IBM, and Bell Labs (with a few specific and localized exceptions) are doing basic research as they were doing a few years ago (or in Bell Lab's case, a few decades ago). Maybe you are right…

Agree. It matters because nothing undermines scientific integrity and productivity like financial insecurity.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

#17

Post by angersock »

Zigurd wrote: post #12

I'm usually on the side of pointing out the squishyness in some numbers, like US productivity and GDP. But we seem not to be in a crisis or even decline in corporate research. Microsoft and Google and, to a limited extent Facebook have taken over from IBM and Xerox and Bell Labs. The Bell Labs business model was highly artificial, and that artificiality was used as an argument not to break up AT&T. Current structures…

Bell Labs got us microwave communications, lasers, transistors, Unix, C, awk, Plan 9, fiber optics, and a bunch of other things.

The new "sustainable" structures, frankly, aren't even a substitute.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

#18

Post by Qworg »

greggarious wrote: post #2

This article seems a bit hyperbolic. Yes, the Silicon Valley branch has shut down, but MSR's main office in Washington is still open and doing great research. It's probably the best industrial lab that's still running. I also have interned at PARC (no longer "Xerox PARC", but still kicking). I was given remarkable freedom both by my direct supervisor and the division manager. Down the road, HP labs was still going (t…

There's also many other MSR labs in many other places: China, Cambridge, Israel, Egypt, Munich, others. Redmond is the just the biggest.

I believe that the SV cut was the right choice vs. "spreading the pain around", but we'll see how it shapes up in the end.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

#19

Post by danjayh »

pm90 wrote: post #13
michaelochurch wrote: post #10

Being in technology, you have a front-row seat to the concept of elective decline , or the idea that civilization's decline is often a collective but intentional choice, rather than the result of external stress. It seems sad, to a historian, that a great empire would "collapse" (an affair that usually happen imperceptibly over hundreds of years) but the reality is that it's the unintended product of millions of indi…

Yes, its pretty sad to see the demise of industrial labs doing more fundamental research, but this might be related to the demise of the big corporations in general. The HN community understandably hates the bigger companies for being monopolies and stifling innovation and whatnot, but there are two sides to the story. A large corporation, with bigger revenues, can think longer term, and invest in basic research so a…

I work for a megacorp. We spend a great deal of cash on self-funded projects to move the state of the art forward in our division's particular niche (avionics). We released a product ~6 years ago that fundamentally changed the computing architecture for modern airplanes (in this case, 787). I work with extraordinarily brilliant people who are given many opportunities to have their cutting edge ideas heard, funded, and executed. While we don't do a lot of basic scientific research, we do plenty of technological research on the absolute cutting edge of our discipline. From what I know of our other industrial divisions, they similarly do cutting edge R&D in their respective fields. I'd hardly say that my megacorp is stifling innovation (quite the opposite, actually). We do have tiny cubes, though :) (but hey - I agree that the money is better spent on R&D, so I have no complaints). I know that not all megacorps and their jobs are quite so awesome, but I can vouch for the fact that some are. As a side benefit, the airframer duopoly prevents distracting patent wars among subcontractors very effectively, leaving us with more resources to work on fun problems.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

#20

Post by alecco »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

I think it's more that the low hanging fruit has been plucked than that there is a 'fall' of industrial research labs. Just like with technology in the early 20th century there was a golden age where advances were relatively quick and dramatic because the fields were brand new. Once the field matures it takes more effort to get up to speed on what has already been learned and evolutionary progress rather than revolut…

I beg to differ, based on experience. The low-hanging fruit is gone only for the paths mainstream research take. There were some great discoveries recently but since they don't resonate with the "in" crowd it gets mostly ignored.
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