Google is the new Bell Labs

Candy Crush, we're holding that up as a development that Apple is responsible that we want to be proud of, seriously? Regardless, an app store wasn't groundbreaking. They executed much better on what Blackberry was already doing with smartphones.

The point isn't necessarily what has come to pass yet, it's the focus on things that don't necessarily have a path to revenue yet. Everything Apple does is product and revenue focused. That is not the case with Google.

You are right that 95% of their revenue comes from Adwords . . . but 95% of their efforts aren't on optimizing Adwords, and that right there is my point: Apple is focused on executing where their revenue is, Google is definitely MORE focused on finding new revenue opportunities, and is more willing to look into unorthodox industries and ideas.

How many researchers are working at Apple Research? Like zero? Because there's no Apple Research? How many researchers are working at Google Research? Like a thousand?

I'd say that makes all the difference.

Google is Oak Ridge.

When I was growing up in Silicon Valley traffic was light, places were far, and there was nothing in between.

Silicon Valley was rarely the place you wanted to be, we all wanted out having been here our whole lives. We wanted New York, we wanted Los Angeles, we wanted anywhere but here.

Over the years that has changed.

You ask most people that work at Google the significance of the Googleplex and no one will ever tell you about the prominence, about how it used to the rolling valleys housed the SGI buildings.

But day in, day out, the buses flow. The cars flow. Once you're on campus it's a different world. Everyone's busy, everyone has something important they're insisting on doing.

The whole of Mountain View, and in turn the surrounding suburban sprawl has been turned into the tiny steams coursing into Oak Ridge.

The highways are jammed. The roads are jammed. There are more lines. There are more people. All eager to do something important. Meals are provided, the buses are provided, the interns get their limos to go to the local hotels

Slowly but surely, we got our wish. Los Angeles came to us. New York came to us.

This is simply not true except perhaps in that any research center will have an aggregate ROI counter that some bureaucrats glance at annually. As somebody pointed out elsewhere, Bell Labs' ROI was capped. Much, and I would argue the best, corporate research is done with almost no consequential oversight from the host corporation. This was certainly the case with Bell Labs, XEROX Parc, and other great research centers of yore just as it is still the case to some extent at Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, and Intel today (between re-orgs).

At present, PARC (no longer under Xerox) operates on something of an agency model and Google runs research projects like startups. This appears to result in a higher rate of short-term commercial success, but at the cost of fundamental research. That said, I think we've done a tremendous amount of fundamental research since World War II and now that the conditions for producing more no longer exist, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit – new configurations of things that already exist – hence the prevalence of startups and the perceived excellence of hybrid research models.