Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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 finding new investments: Xerox. Kodak Eastmann. Google might meet this definition.

I think we also overrate the significance of the corporate labs. There are not a lot of successful examples where the host company actually profited from the invention. Just a lot that bungled them or prematurely killed them (like when AT&T almost invented the internet). Or snuck out accidentally (like the Xerox Alto).

View on HN

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 be bothered to bootstrap a new org-unit. They just devour smaller, innovative and creative companies. Look at Google, they couldn't be creative and patient enough to compete with youtube so they gulp up youtube. It's the bigcorp M.O.

So why bother with R&D when you can just buy a smaller company that does R&D, tests the market and builds a brand for you? 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. I like IBM as the best example, they are doing superb amounta of innovation even today but look at all their initiatives lack any traction or competitive edge. They have a ton of smart people working on brand new areas of tech like quantum computing,but their reputation and overall culture has not been great. They've been declining consistently. Look at yahoo, yahoo!! They had legitimate means to compete with google toe-to-toe,they relied too much on aquisitions as did Verizon that recently aquired them for a meager $4B.

In the end I blame all this on how publicly traded companies prioritize quarterly profits as opposed to multi-year growth. Acquiring bumps up the stock value for a while, spending billions starting from scratch competing or developing a new concept is risky so stocks go down.

> Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube.

It is far more likely that YouTube will go bankrupt, since running a free video service where videos are almost infinite and cache hits much lower is very costly. Couple that with all the other advantages of being with Google like access to talent and infra, I don't see YouTube surviving with Google. It's possible that the tab will be picked up by Facebook video, and that is an even worse platform and more closed.

I don't see a cheap way of solving the YouTube problem. (Yes P2P exists but has too many problems like battery consumption on phones and NAT).

That would be fantastic tho, we would have an influx of startups competing in the video space, since they don’t have to compete with youtube being artificially propped up by a completely unrelated business model

Yeah, startups aren't going to magically make things cheaper than YouTube. So if any startups arise, they would follow a paid model most likely.

Now that might be fantastic depending on where you come from. If you have disposable income, it is a huge win to have a non ad supported video platform which might even be more privacy protecting. If you are a poor kid using YouTube to watch MIT OCW and khan academy and innumerable other resources, well you are screwed.

If you are a poor kid, you upload your interpretation of a Bach piece and get slammed by an injust, extralegal pseudo-copyright mechanism, that’s in essence an attack on human culture..

MIT and Khan Academy could easily host their content using BitTorrent and reduce their bandwidth usage by 95% ( https://nrkbeta.no/2008/03/02/thoughts-on-bittorrent-distrib... )

Why do you think that a dozen of startups in the space remaining after a possible youtube demise won't be burdened by the same policies? I think that the copyright lobby would try their best to tighten their control at a time when a huge corp stopped throwing its weight against them.

What youtube gives to the poor kid is instant and free access to a huge audience. Yes, it's comes with an (admittedly not really high) risk of a false positive and blocking for copyright reasons. I suppose the kid is smart enough to also have copies of the performance on other services, and safely stored locally.

Oh, they absolutely would! Every music streaming service is already beholden to a tiny record industry cartel, even though there are a number of music streaming services.

But it’s simple, video is more versatile, and by removing youtube’s monolithic dominance, you remove the single point of failure that copyright cartels have been able to attack.

As an example, imagine a separate youtube-clone dedicated to education that was actually willing to fight for fair use! Or a youtube that didn’t automatically demonetized you for swearing.

Internet already gives these kids (and the rest of us) both access and audience, we have just been stupid enough to lock large parts of our cultural heritage into corporate silos, protected by “intellectual property”-laws. Competition wouldn’t solve this completely, but it would make it harder to distort the market.

That's basically what PeerTube tries to do. It doesn't work well in practice for most people and organizations that try it because most videos only have 0-1 watchers at a time.

Yeah, exactly. Because they have to compete with a behemoth subsidized by an invasive advertising company..

Thanks @cannabis_sam, never thought of this but yes absolutely. The tech is slowly getting there... but innovation would speed up a lot more if there was a significant enough pain (and therefore significant enough upside).

What are you talking about?

I'm talking about being competition to an entity like YouTube which is funded by an internet advertising behemoth. Is that what you're talking about?

YouTube can afford to offer a lot of value to the customer, much more than it would have been able to sustain by itself without the Google support.

Without offering all that value, definitionally, Youtube would not be as attractive to consumers.

Therefore consumers would be more likely to choose other alternatives like PeerTube

Therefore projects like PeerTube would have more support and therefore would develop more quickly.

I think YouTube fits in perfectly with Google. It allows them to offer another medium of advertisement (video) to their customers. If YouTube was split off, both creator earnings and YouTube earnings would fall through the floor because the ads wouldn't be worth so much without Google's targeting algorithm behind it.

An unrelated company to their business model is something like Waymo

Netflix made it and proved a market for paid streaming services. Google has bungled this again and again and is currently in the middle of pitting its ad revenue against its top content creators which will only wind up killing both. They've already demolished their recommendation algorithm in favour of just showing repeats of what you just watched so they can cover their ass. Creators are still using 3rd party services to get paid since almost anything can get you demonitized nowadays. Giant channels like JRE are jumping ship. Nobody wants to pay for YouTube Premium if all they're going to do is kick the legs out from under all the worthwhile channels and turn the service into Cable TV 2.0. All this means they've got much bigger problems than paying for storage and delivery.

Netflix and YouTube are not even remotely comparable. The vast majority of Netflix traffic can fit into hardware appliances installed on ISPs, or in the cache of Netflix DCs, since the tail is very small. Plus Netflix is very expensive outside of the developed world in terms of PPP, whereas YouTube is free for even the poorest.

They have got problems, yes , but there is far too much good content on youtube with a very very long tail. In lockdown, I have tried almost dozens of different cooking channels for different things. It is the magic of YouTube that so many people are able to take their content to so many viewers seamlessly at no cost or loss of convenience to them.

I agree that there is no _free_ way of solving the YouTube problem. As for cheapness? We don't yet know what the space looks like because YouTube kills off its competitors by undercutting them preemptively. If we hadn't had YouTube all these years, by now there's at least a possibility that other approaches (ad-driven, subscription-driven, etc.) would have been explored for low-cost user-generated content, and we'd have a better idea of what the actual cost is, as opposed to this bifurcated monopoly between the networks providing professionally-produced content (including burgeoning streaming services) and YouTube capturing the remaining content.

It seems a competitor like Dailymotion was able to survive on its own, bar YouTube competition. I m not sure its viable with it, but without google it seemed profitable.

Eh, another venture-backed story with no road to profitability, handed off between various acquisitions and allowed to bleed money in the hopes of drawing business.

were you talking about facebook, youtube, google or dailymotion?

In this case, I was lumping dailymotion in with the others you mention.

Google makes a $15B a year from YouTube.

That pays for a lot of storage. And storage is very cheap at that scale.

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

Cost of streaming videos is not storage, it's dominated by bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive when you can't cache videos the way Netflix does.

a) Google doesn't pay for bandwidth. They have peering agreements because of all the dark fiber they bought (https://www.lightreading.com/optical/dwdm/google-dark-fiber-...)

This isn't exclusive to Google though - most large bandwidth users have peering agreements.

b) Google does have edge caches[1]. It's true that the long tail of YouTube videos is longer than Netflix, but since Google doesn't pay for traffic (see (a)) this only affects speed, not cost.

[1] https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

I would argue that in a system where the content is "almost infinite" the average value of each content item is "almost zero". Cache hits stats could be interesting to see what percentage of the content is never watched.

> 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 laments the death of those “brands”

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.

You mention Siri as an example of Apple taking credit. Siri was on the App Store before Apple bought it and they kept the name.

But honestly, who cares but geeks about what the general population thinks about who invented it?

I worked at SRI, though not on Siri. (Wish I had; they got a nice payday when it was bought.) Siri was weaker before Apple bought it, because there was only so much they could do with the public APIs. Apple buying it was the best outcome. It allowed Siri to come into its full potential, while at the same time inspiring others to make their own.

The same happen with the Workflow app. It was a great app when it was independent but became much better when Apple bought it and integrated it into iOS.

> Siri was weaker before Apple bought it, because there was only so much they could do with the public APIs. Apple buying it was the best outcome.

Umm, this is exactly the problem the article talks about.

The fact that you had to pay obeisance to Apple to get access to private APIs and data is a failure of the anti-trust mechanisms.

The fact that Apple could just buy up Siri without anti-trust mechanisms kicking in meant they can just sit in their castle and let somebody else do the hard work.

Why would I trust random third parties with the level of access that Apple has? Should Apple also allow access to the Secure Enclave by third parties?

VCs don’t invest in startups to help them build low profit “lifestyle businesses”. They fully expect them to be acquired or rarely become public. Just as an anecdote that we are all familiar with, only two YC companies have gone public — Pagerduty and Dropbox - and Dropbox is still not GAAP profitable.

If the governments takes away the ability of companies to get acquired, investments in startups will dry up and $BigTech would be the only ones with money to do research.

I guess the line of reasoning above is that anyone concerned with remaining competitive in the global market should care, because (again, following the reasoning above) the general population is what decides on economic policy in a democracy.

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.

I don't know what the current figure is but traditionally Apple's spending on R&D has been quite low for the size of the business.

People here are constantly lamenting the lack of good multitouch on anything but a Macbook, especially in Linux. If Fingerworks had stayed as an independent company they could also sell their touchpads to Microsoft for the Surface. Of course Apple bought them before they were a well known brand; maybe that's why their acquisitions are more successful.

Where do we draw the line between innovation and new features?

> Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube.

This doesn't make sense to me. Google search and youtube are just front-ends for Alphabet to make money through advertising.

If Alphabet truly was broken up, Google search and youtube would not be able to use google ads jointly in the same way, and they don't make money otherwise.

> My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead.

Not so sure about that. Maybe if you read HN a lot, but I think most users won't even notice.

"Facebook bought WhatsApp - guess we're moving the family group chat to Signal"

if that anecdote was applicable to the broader market, wouldn’t we have seen WhatsApp’s numbers decline and Signal’s numbers rise after the acquisition?

Signal is very popular but whatsapp was aquired before Signal was well known (2014-15 I think) and their user base mostly don't even know it belongs to FB. I have had multiple people act shocked when I tell them whatsapp and Instagram are FB.

I was being sarcastic

Your core consumers that are foundational to your brand will always care. But more often than not if there are no alternatives it just becomes a long term disinterest in your brand.

Fun example: Star wars fans and Disney aquisition.

Considering Star wars media continues to print money for Disney, and core Star wars consumers were appalled at the franchise before the acquisition (prequels), that's not the best example.

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?

> 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?

Youtube’s main value is it’s market dominance. That’s why it’s so terrible to use, there’s no competitive incentive to actually improve the user aspects of the service (the advertisers are a COMPLETELY different ballgame tho), they already own the video space and have google/alphabet’s financial muscle to keep competitors away.

> 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.

Under Google not so much. But you just need liquidity for R&D, the point being you will develop new concepts that will improve profits. Netflix,hulu,amazon prime all came after youtube,perhaps good R&D without Alaphapet's shackles would have let them compete in those markets and more (video conferencing for example like zoom).

Netflix had a profitable dvd business, Hulu has the backing of major studios, Prime has Amazon.

I dont think Youtube would have survived without Google.

Ironically, acquiring generally lowers the acquirer’s stock price in the short term.

Increasingly they don't even buy small companies. They just copy. Look at half of Microsoft recent activity.

recent? They have been copying since the 1980s...

True. There was a phase of acquisitions in the interim.

Anti-trust enforcement can take many forms -- breaking companies up is just one of the most extreme and obvious ones -- but often just the threat of action was enough since for a while the US government backed it up.

A big reason Bell Labs was created and perpetuated was because AT&T feared being broken up. Bell Labs was effectively a PR vehicle they used to show the US government that they were giving back to the community, and an excuse to continue operating as a de-facto state-sanctioned monopoly. Today's toothless FTC and DoJ don't really inspire that kind of fear.

Source (sort of, paraphrased) - This is a big theme of The Idea Factory which describes the heyday of Bell Labs.

(Edited to further develop my thought)

This isn't quite accurate, they were mandated by law to fund bell labs, and bared from profiting from its inventions outside of the telephony domain.

Well, a lot of / most of deep machine learning breakthroughs are coming directly from research scientists at Facebook, Google, NVIDIA, (other major tech companies) or research organizations associated with them or their executives.

It's difficult for academic labs to keep up, actually.

Whilst modern economics and the startup model makes it easier for companies to let startups do the actual idea testing (and then buy up the successful experiments), there's a ton of companies that are still driving entire industries with their corporate-funded research.

We should also probably note that a lot of the funding for some very successful academic labs comes from these large corporations as well.

> It's difficult for academic labs to keep up, actually.

That's probably more an intrinsic problem with academia (lower wages, limited career opportunities, limited resources compared to companies).

There is a spectrum of the kinds of research one might do. My advisor always used to remind me that if a team of good engineers at a big corporation can do something, it's not a good research problem to tackle for a grad student in a uni lab. So we naturally tended to more speculative/fundamental problems, which seems like a good thing - instead of trying to compete with industry labs we augment them.

This is kind of odd logic though. If a well funded team of experts who care about the utility of the results would focus on a problem, you shouldn't.

What makes you think the advisor's projects were genuinely more speculative or more fundamental vs just dead ends that nobody cared about? It's not like corp labs don't fund fundamental work. Google was funding quantum computers for a long time now.

That sounds like a good thing, but realize that some day industry will build an application based on your ideas and patent the result. Patents are a monopoly on technology, and working for a university, probably the last thing you had in mind was that other people would monopolize your inventions so that their use would become limited.

University labs are generally good at dealing with patents. Researchers do generate patents where it makes sense, and the processes are set up such that the university gets some ownership with the option for the researchers to transfer the knowledge to companies e.g. student graduates and founds a startup with the patent as foundational IP. This is all intentional and it's one of the ways for the labs to do their job of disseminating their discoveries and transfer knowledge to industry.

Still, patents are a way to provide exclusive access to technology, to those who pay. That's not something I personally would like to see happening to my inventions if I'd work at a university. It's also not how universities used to operate, traditionally.

Further, I feel that if it's paid for by the public, it belongs to the public.

This is how my advisor and I reshaped my recent masters thesis. I was thinking of an engineering problem, but he reminded me of some really cool ways we could do basic science. It ended up being really rewarding and still novel.

My advisor made the exact same point. Although we did receive funding from startups to work on adjacent problems.

And also an artifact of strategic choice of pursuit of these technologies.

Due to the resource and scaling requirements (as well as inherent skill needed), replication of efforts for expansion purposes is difficult and that's one reason (not the only reason) these sort of modeling approaches are being pursued.

A lot of technology choices are being chosen because of an inherent high barrier to entry, limiting competition risk.

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 from investing in their own future via plush corporate labs. There's a great quote from Alan Kay that Xerox did actually make enormous profits from their Xerox Park labs, as the labs invented laser printing, but Xerox decided not to make trillions by pursuing their invention of graphical personal computers and ethernet.

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 reflects that. Apple or Microsoft were not. They're interested in products. What rocks Zuch's boat is is reach. I don't think he'd be that excited about purely technological breakthroughs. He'd only be excited about ways these can extend FB's footprint.

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.

Don't you evaluate Microsoft Research?

Just about everything in the article doesn’t pass a sniff test to me.

Aside from the issue you mentioned, the article seems to be making the claim that we have less innovation today. Which just seems like a ridiculous claim to me.

It also mentions “pervasive short-termism” as an obstacle. It might be in large public companies, but it’s certainly not in the private equity markets. Innovative companies have access to huge amounts of capital, and can stay unprofitable for such a long period of time that many people think we’re in a bubble. Multi-billion dollar valuation and “may never be profitable” is perfectly ordinary these days, and certainly doesn’t lend any credibility to the authors argument.

> the article seems to be making the claim that we have less innovation today. Which just seems like a ridiculous claim to me.

looking at econonmic growth it's extremely hard to deny. The years ca. 1945-1975 constitute an exceptional period in innovation far surpassing anything today, both qualitatively as well as quantitavely. (new marginal innovations in tech or pharmaceuticals today tend to be about 10-50x more expensive than just a few decades ago).

Relevant reading: The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War Robert J Gordon

In the enlightenment you could make discoveries about lightning with a kite and a key, in your free time when you weren't working as a publisher or founding America.

In 2020 you need 10,000 scientists and $9bn to build a hadron collider, and 99.9% of people won't even understand if your result is important or not.

Are we less good at science now, given that we're spending far more resources for far less impact? Or rather, are we better, but the lowest hanging and juiciest fruit got picked first?

> In the enlightenment you could make discoveries about lightning with a kite and a key, in your free time when you weren't working as a publisher or founding America.

And yet those discoveries weren't made in the previous thousands of years during which people had been standing around in thunderstorms. The enlightenment represented a paradigm shift where a new innovation - the scientific method - was applied en masse for the first time and it led to revolutions in science, technology, and society. Whenever a paradigm shift happens, be it the practical steam engine or long range electricity transmission, you invariably have a lot of suddenly accessible low hanging fruit. The mid 20th century had a surprisingly large number of such paradigm shifting innovations such as solid state transistors, integrated circuits, jet engines, nuclear reactors, antibiotics, solar cells, the internet, lasers, credit cards, the list goes on. Entire new fields of science and sectors of industry popped up in a very short period of time.

We continue to innovate, but our innovations are mostly evolutionary and there have been comparatively few paradigm altering inventions in the past 30 years, especially when one considers how much larger the population of sufficiently educated and affluent individuals who could produce such innovations has become and how much easier it is for such innovations to be communicated. It is impressive how good we've gotten at picking higher fruit, but we should still be asking why we are struggling so hard to find low hanging fruit.

The big problems in science can be solved by much smaller teams. LHC is just proving out the dominant paradigm. It’s not gonna help us understand dark matter and _that’s_ the real anomaly in the current physical understanding of the world. Crack that an you’re the next Einstein/newton or at least Planck/schrodinger/hooke.

There’s plenty of room for innovation in green energy tech, housing materials, ag science, etc... We’re objectively spending more to get those than we used to need to. And that’s WITH google and scihub! Something is rotten.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how scientific research (especially physics) works. You take a model. You figure out some observable predictions of that model. You run an experiment to test that prediction. If it's right, the experiment stands as support to the model's accuracy. More importantly, sometimes the predictions are wrong. After a pattern of anomalies, someone comes up with a model that explains them. Rinse, repeat.

The idea that the "big problems" can be solved by small teams pontificating is missing all but that last step.

We must be talking past each other, as I understand it quite well.

My point (which I understand is controversial) is there's no requirement for billions of dollars and thousands of scientists to make the next big breakthrough. There's still low hanging fruit. Less than there used to be, but it's still there.

The LHC and big $$ funding is _one_ way to do it. So far its been unable to solve the biggest problems we have in physics (agreed that it's helped disprove some).

We're at a point now that is similar to what people were saying in 1900. Some people say "we've almost dusted this physics thing off and figured it all out". I'm fairly confident something is going to come along from some small corner of physics that will knock all our socks off the same way Quantum Mech and Relativity did... it may arrive this year or it may arrive in 120 years more to get there though.

The big problems in science can be solved by much smaller teams is my point. Sure it will take an army to completely work out the implications of the breakthrough. But the breakthrough "aha" can still come from an individual or small team.

> It’s not gonna help us understand dark matter

In case anyone wants a quick link to the LHC dark matter program, check the ATLAS [1] and CMS [2] summaries.

TL;DR: The LHC has ruled out a good chunk of a few popular dark matter variants already. There are a lot more searches in the pipeline. They haven't found anything yet, but of course nature doesn't just drop particles in the first place you look.

There are also some crazier plans in the works [3] which use the existing beams to look in other places.

[1]: https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/CombinedSumma...

[2]: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMSPublic/SummaryPlotsE...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASER_experiment

> We’re objectively spending more to get those than we used to need to. And that’s WITH google and scihub! Something is rotten.

What’s rotten exactly? Take a look at this lovely graph [0] showing the cost of solar cells going from $76.67/watt in 1977, to $0.74/watt in 2013 (the price of installation is obviously more than the cell production costs, at about $2.5-$3.5/watt today).

[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2014/09/04/solar-panel-cost-trends...

Surely you see the difference between explaining what dark matter is, and making solar cells cheaper.

Which one fits your definition of important scientific question that we should answer?

The years 1945-1988 are exactly the years of the Cold War as well. It seems likely to me that much of our innovation did not come from corporate research labs alone, but from government and defense spending. And defense spending was not just bullets and band-aids, but also basic research. (My favorite example is the Lambda the Ultimate papers were paid for by the Office of Naval Research.)

It's not surprising that the period that covers the invention of transistors, integrated circuits and microprocessors saw significant technological leaps. You can make the same observations about the periods when steam, gas and electric power came to market.

What you're describing though is a small number of companies making significant technological leaps, not the quantity of innovation. People also argue that the invention of the internet, and the subsequent global proliferation high speed internet represents the same sort of revolutionary leap forward (one that we're going through right now).

people argue that but it's not anywhere in the numbers (and even more importantly, in lived experience). The argument can be made that this innovation just lags the invention of the internet but that's kind of unfalsifiable and looks increasingly like rationalisation.

One key difference is that inventions like the microprocessor or the steam engine are deeply fundamental. They're at the 'backend' of the chain. Internet based digital services are at the consumer end. Which has produced some growth, but could be argued to mostly fuel hedonistic consumption. (It's hard to figure out what deep growth watching hours of tiktok creates)

In his book Gordon points to the thought experiment of going to sleep in 1870 and waking up in 1970 in NY. You'd be in an entirely transformed world. Cars, buildings reaching into the sky everywhere, electrified subway stations, computers, drugs that save countless of millions of lives, modern agriculture and so forth. Go to sleep in 1970 and wake up in 2020 and what's changed, other than people staring at tiny screens?

But you're not describing the pace of innovation at all. You're just describing your own judgements about the value of modern innovations. What would COVID-19 look like in 1970? I bet there wouldn't be many people working from home...

COVID-1970 would be a lot slower in the spread due to much less globalized world. The West probably would still not have experienced it, neither the Soviet Bloc due to then fresh Sino-Soviet split and heavily militarized border.

I think the Spanish flu might not agree with that assessment. Both plagues also did a pretty good job of spreading to pretty much all territories that had any form of contact at the time.

IMO the better example was 1957 Asian flu pandemic. It also started in China in December-February, but was not yet registered in the West as of May.

It also never crossed the Iron Curtain into Warsaw Pact countries.

2070 very probably will be entirely different than 1970, though. What changed is that computers have allowed us to go to space (at scale) and other incredible feats.

I remember thinking in 1980s that year 2000 would be something unrecognizable. You can feel this optimism in movies like Back to the Future, Blade Runner, Terminator or Escape From New York. They would set entirely different worlds in relatively near future, largely due to expectations from then recent technological change rates.

In reality (aside from tremendous change of political landscape) the 80s and the 00s weren't particularly different to live in.

The ability to have all information at your fingertips everywhere is a big big change.

The choice of New York drives some of this. Go to sleep in Shanghai in 1970, and wake up in 2020...

You're focusing on semiconductors but the same period saw a large number of new plastics, velcro, contact lenses, credit cards, the atomic clock, the orbital rocket / artificial satellite, the laser, the seat belt, fibre optics, the LED, and many other materials science breakthroughs.

And I guess this is the reason WeWork and their kind is notoriously hated by many people; It sell itself as a "tech startup" while it is not.

"tech startups" seems to be synonymous with what the author call the "successors of corporate labs", and that seems to be why VC:s seems to be OK with pouring moneys for a semi-long term payback.

People/Companies that play this expectation (such as WeWork and Theranos) get the moral shaming from mostly tech people, while the rest seems to not get the point of the hate. (Not much indifferent from why some people do/didn't see the point of a corporate lab more than a cost sink)

Come to think of it, Company/CEO:s that overly focus on the "tech" image might be a warning sign that they might be just snake oil (such as Theranos CEO mimicing Jobs)

I think you’re confusing innovation with technological innovation. There’s plenty of ways to innovate without advancing technology. There’s also plenty of fields of research unrelated to technology.

Even if you were only concerned with technological innovation, referencing well funded non-technical companies doesn’t negate the existence of any of the well funded technology-focused companies.

Also, Theranos is a perfect example of private equity funding technological research. The fact that it was a scam doesn’t take away from the interest it’s investors had in new technology.

Really interesting point regarding the many year unprofitable VC backed companies being almost a replacement form of corporate lab. Though most of those aren't pursuing "hard technology" equivalents to inventing transistors or the like. Well perhaps Quantum Computers at Google, but they don't seem to be pursuing that correctly. What are your thoughts on hard technology like that?

I think that moves the goal posts a bit. UNIX was one of the most significant products to come out of Bell, and that's still used today. My laptop, my playstation and all of the production servers I'm responsible for use software based on innovations, based on innovations, based on innovations... of UNIX. For things like microprocessor, display, storage, network, camera, microphone... hardware, all of that is still advanced via large corporate research, and it continues to be innovated to such an extent that we came up with things like Moore's Law to describe its' pace.

A lot of the technology I use at work is funded innovation. Linux (largely Intel), React (facebook), Rust (Mozilla - kinda), Golang (Google), Objective-C, Kotlin, Typescript... There's also a huge number of AI and some very well-funded self-driving-car startups. For hardware, it's unlikely that a startup is going to disrupt companies like Intel, AMD, nVidia, Samsung... but that's only because they're already innovating at such an impressive pace. But even those companies don't come up with all their own innovations. For instance, the technology in the new displays Samsung recently announced comes from a company called Nanosys, which has been funding reliant since 2001. Theranos also comes to mind, which while it was a scam, it was a very well funded one.

>Linux (largely Intel)

Wasn't MSFT the biggest $$ donor, and RedHat the one with more devs commiting?

Very good points.

I think we (I, maybe) default to the mistake of thinking in terms of "one big systemic explanation." Ultimately, something like investment in or success at innovation doesn't follow strict rules. The factors that go into it tend to be local. Any practicable "Theory of Innovation" is likely to be true locally, at best.

A few years back Neil Degrasse Tyson, advocating for a re-funding of the NASA space shuttle, made the argument that private companies will never pioneer space exploration. Mars missions and such. He had Elon in his sights, but also others who were starting to "invest in space" at the time.

It was a good argument. It was logical, consistent with 50 years of space exploration experience and parsimonious with analogies from other industries, history, etc.

Neil was also wrong, and I think he'd agree to moderate that argument significantly today.

Is the Space Shuttle really a great example? Two of the five exploded killing people and it ended up being more expensive and less efficient than the non reusable Russian equivalent.

https://gizmodo.com/the-space-shuttle-was-a-beautiful-but-te...

There were 135 Shuttle missions flown. Two ended in disaster.

There is a huge difference between a 1.4% failure rate and a 40% failure rate.

NASA got a whole lot of science done with those missions.

But more missions would have been flown if the Shuttle was more reliable. This is a kind of survivorship bias where we don't know how many missions would have been flown with a different design.

Is explode the right verb for Columbia?

Also, it's not as though the Russians and Soviets didn't have their share of in-flight fatalities as well.

The shuttle was capable of missions that wouldn't have otherwise been possible. It also ferried more people at once.

That said, the shuttle was severely underutilized and hence costed a lot more than it should have.

> Is explode the right verb for Columbia?

I don't think so, really.

Columbia didn’t explode in the sense of a massive detonation of something onboard. It had a hole punched in the wing during take off. During re-entry, hot gasses penetrated the wing and led to failure of the control surfaces, and the resultant loss of control (it was gliding at this point) caused heating and dynamic pressures that eventually led to vehicle break up [0].

Strictly speaking, the Challenger also wasn’t destroyed by an explosion. The failure of an O-ring on one of the Solid Rocket Boosters led to pressurised burning gas destroying the attachment hardware the held the SRB in place. The SRB ripped away causing the entire stack to tumble. Challenger ended up at the top and had its back broken by aerodynamic forces at the same time as the thin skin of the external fuel tank shredded, leading to a sudden massive burn of the fuel it contained (which caused the ‘explosion’ effect so visible from the ground). The crew compartment 'survived' all this and continued ballistically upward before falling back to the sea where it was destroyed on impact, killing the crew. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

No, and it's not precisely the argument he was making. He was arguing for manned exploration generally, and large scale space projects generally. I was abbreviating, poorly as you point out.

Very true. I think there is also a lot of hindsight bias in the article and the comments

He was wrong, although the space exploration pioneering that SpaceX may do (landing on mars, for example) seems more likely to be motivated by passion than by shareholder returns.

But most companies are motivated by passion. The idea that it's all about shareholder returns is a myth put about by the ideologically motivated. Most companies don't even have public shareholders to begin with, and of the rest, it's not like Apple, Facebook or Google ever even tried to care about what their shareholders thought. They were totally open that they were motivated by passion and would invest billions into whatever pet projects the CEOs happened to find cool. Heck the trend has been to define voting classes such that shareholders are formally excluded from even marginal influence over decision making.

This stereotype of the corporate executive who only cares about increasing profits is based on a kernel of truth, but only because the world is full of mature companies whose leadership are devoid of ideas for where they go next .. so why not focus on optimisation ("shareholder returns")? But then again the world is full of NGOs with no vision, it's full of academic departments churning out low quality grant applications just so they can expand their labs. Lack of vision and a focus on money is hardly unique to any one kind of group. At least shareholder returns are about making money for other people rather than yourselves!

It seems like a good funding model for basic research to leverage the size of monopoly companies like those mentioned.

In the monopoly position they are no longer concerned about competition so don't need to worry about their position ever more. Unlike startups which are constantly in survival mode so basic research with long term benefits is like the last thing they would spend money on.

Long term basic research in academic settings is also not very viable. It seems to favor vocal people with grant hunting skills instead of true researchers. Also academic environment seems to diverge away from practicing of science to more like practicing of religion by studying and promoting either topics completely ungrounded to reality or promoting outright politicized topics.

Monopoly companies on the other hand have a good track record of amazing research which is still practical but with long term vision which can have great benefits to the entire society.

So monopoly companies should not be broken up but forced to allocate percentage of revenue to this research like the examples of Xerox PARC and AT&T Bell Labs. If the companies have the privilege of no competition they should pay heavily for it.

Also since monopolies often fall into caregory of too-big-to-fail companies necessary for economy they should be paying a bailout tax - because you know they will need bailout money in crises, so better to fund it upfront instead of being so surprised that we need bailouts every time the market wobbles.

Monopolies are not very well studied by political and economics circles - everybody fears them and think of them as bad. They are inevitable anyway - infrastructure networks can't be form a competition unless a new technology appears. Maybe monopolies have a natural role in society.

Embrace, not fear, the monopoly. But understand it is a monopoly and you grant it expensive privileges that they would otherwise use to extract rents from the society. Let them pay for the privileges appropriately and you can form a nice symbiotic relationship with monopolies.

>Unlike startups which are constantly in survival mode so basic research with long term benefits is like the last thing they would spend money on.

Sure startups are in survival mode, but they are trying to survive while getting someone else to pay for testing an idea. Aren't startups like VC funded research in a way?

Read the Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s all about asymmetric competition and how to compete against a monopoly. All of the FAANGMs got to be that way by toppling a previous market leader.

The book "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" is a great story about the history of Bell Labs and how the anti-trust suit effectively killed it.

This statement ignores the reason put forth by the authors of the research paper mentioned in the article - that anti-trust enforcement discouraged _mergers and acquisitions_ forcing companies to invest in research.

FTA: >Arora et al point out that the rise and fall of the labs coincided with the rise and fall of anti-trust enforcement: Historically, many large labs were set up partly because antitrust pressures constrained large firms’ ability to grow through mergers and acquisitions. In the 1930s, if a leading firm wanted to grow, it needed to develop new markets. With growth through mergers and acquisitions constrained by anti-trust pressures, and with little on offer from universities and independent inventors, it often had no choice but to invest in internal R&D. The more relaxed antitrust environment in the 1980s, however, changed this status quo. Growth through acquisitions became a more viable alternative to internal research, and hence the need to invest in internal research was reduced.

A good question would be, although there was a decline in these kinds of research labs, did the market make up for that decline though the current strategy of investment in entrepreneurs and startups?

> There are not a lot of successful examples where the host company actually profited from the invention.

Maybe we should not hold on to the bureaucracy patents bring. Especially considering in some countries international patent are used as recipe to copy innovations.

Tesla has moved their patents into open source because they are under the opinion that competition is won by attracting the best engineers.

> Elon Musk: "After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible."

https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-y...

Further, they're assuming causality in the direction of a decline in corporate R&D causing the rise of (generally government-supported) university research. But I don't see them providing support for that assumption.

Could it be the other way around? That government-supported research in the universities had (at least to some degree) the effect of crowding-out the corporate labs? I mean, if the government is going to foot the bill, then why would I want to spend my own money on it?

> I think we also overrate the significance of the corporate labs. There are not a lot of successful examples where the host company actually profited from the invention. Just a lot that bungled them or prematurely killed them (like when AT&T almost invented the internet). Or snuck out accidentally (like the Xerox Alto).

Only on HN would someone argue that we've overrated the significance of the invention of GUIs because it didn't make the company that invented it enough money.

Microsoft Research has had a lot of features and products come out of it. They also publish an incredible amount of basic research.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com