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Comment by kulkarnic | Hacker News Reader

I'm somewhat familiar with the research models afforded by both companies, and have a slightly different view.

Research at IBM is mostly product-group driven. Microsoft affords more flexibility- allowing more academic research, for example. This puts them farther into the future, IMO, than solving immediate product research needs. What I meant by investment above is more than monetary- it takes a lot to get a good research team going.

I agree that nothing can save a company with shut eyes. A strong research group is a way to keep them open.

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That may be true of IBM today, but I’m not so sure it’s true of IBM 15 or 20 years ago, which is, I think, what you were trying to make your point about, above. For decades, IBM made more than half of all the CPUs in the world, and really had by a considerable margin the most R&D of any tech company, including all kinds of extremely forward-looking “basic research” type stuff. More recently, they’ve switched to a much more services/consulting “solve particular companies’ problems one at a time” type approach, and correspondingly sold off their PC business, among other consumer-oriented parts of the company, and ditched a lot of the most pure academic research. But that’s only been after they stopped being the dominant computer maker.

Anyway, I think you could possibly be right; I just think you need a better example than IBM. :-)

They still make the CPUs for the XBox 360, PS3, and Wii, and they do a fair amount of collaboration with AMD, so they're still making an impressive number of CPUs.

Perhaps, but consider:

* Agile practice indicates that experience with users is the best way to keep project on a useful path. Research groups necessarily act without such input, which leaves them prone to going off into the weeds, including producing interesting technologies without a total appreciation for the practicalities, or a clear path to delivering it to users.

* One of Jobs' first acts on returning to Apple was to disband the research group (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203996.html). Why? I would guess because he wanted research to happen in the course of and for the purpose of innovative product development. There you can get the benefit of a user-focused development process, with a defined end result.

* As with any institution (e.g. NASA http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092972), without accountability from strong leadership or users they're prone to unproductive efforts. After all, how do you judge the quality of their efforts? How can you motivate them to strive - day to day at all levels - to make an impact, when they have these cushy unaccountable ivory tower positions?

Or, more practically, what has MSR produced that's active in changing the world, compared to a handful of startups acquired by Apple?

Or, more practically, what has MSR produced that's active in changing the world, compared to a handful of startups acquired by Apple?

the premise of funding basic research (as opposed applied product-driven research) is that only by giving researchers freedom from short-term demands can it be possible for them to do something truly innovative and 'out of the mold'. a 'classic' example is all the work done by brilliant researchers at Xerox PARC in the '70's that was way ahead of its time; of course, Xerox execs have been kicking themselves in the rear for not capitalizing on those technologies (Apple and Microsoft did), but the hope is that Microsoft will be smarter than Xerox was and actually capitalize on basic research created in MSR. Giving researchers freedom will breed lots of supposedly-useless work (that's only useful or interesting to academics), but it provides a greater possibility of doing something totally game-changing.

Since you bring up Xerox PARC, don't/didn't they suffer from the same problem? Lack of/poor marketing?

You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.

It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.

But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.

At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.

You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.

It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.

But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.

You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.

It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.

But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.

> Or, more practically, what has MSR produced that's active in changing the world, compared to a handful of startups acquired by Apple?

I see a lot of great stuff coming out of MSR; their Simons are almost single-handedly responsible for GHC's internals and over the last 2 decades making Haskell a usable, nay, fast, language. But what OSs is Haskell principally developed & used on? Linux or OSX.

for me it looks like Microsoft is doing a lot of research into the equivalent of 'Fusion' (always fifty years away) - which is not of much benefit for their current customers...

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