Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Nokia Research Center for a while when it was still market leader making smart phones. My observation is that most companies that have a research center also have some level of disconnect between their main business and their research branches. The two just operate on different time lines.

More worryingly and problematic is that there is also a notion of "not invented here" where business units have very little patience for things coming out of research units because they weren't involved. It's petty and stupid and in Nokia's case a large part of the reason why Apple and Google ate its lunch. It's not that they did not have competing technology but that they didn't know what to do with it.

Corporate R&D works best when corporate leadership has some level of affinity with it. Elon Musk is a great example of a true R&D minded leader. All his companies are basically are R&D labs that happen to produce insanely valuable products as a side effect. It takes a certain type of leadership to funnel billions to the right projects and then turn them into successful products. It requires something most business leaders simply don't have: a clue. Elon Musk for all his flaws understands technology deeply. Most of his contemporaries in the car industry are clueless bean counters that know little more about cars than the number of wheels they are typically equipped with. I bet pretty much all of them had R&D labs 20 years ago working on exactly the kind of things that Tesla brought to market successfully. They just bungled turning that into product because of a lack of vision & technical leadership.

I remember reading in the early iPhone days that Apple recognised virtually no spending on R&D. That wasn’t because they didn’t do research or develop new products, it’s that they simply didn’t see that as separate from their normal day to day operations. I think that’s the same attitude as You’re describing with Elon Musk. It’s all R&D all the time. That’s just how products are developed.

Now it’s different at Apple in that they do recognise a lot if spending on R&D but I think that’s for tax reasons.

Exactly, Steve Jobs would involve himself deeply with product development and be in the loop on a lot of product detail.

What you don't get to see with Apple is all the stuff they don't launch or that lingers on some shelf for years and years. They only talk openly about stuff that they are ready to show and productize giving the false impression that these things just popped into existence.

By the time the iphone shipped, they'd been working on it in some form or another for over half a decade or so. Giving people enough room to do stuff like that with an open ended agenda and strategy is exactly how you move forward as a company. The value of people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk is recognizing the strategic value of efforts like this in an early stage and then making sure it happens. That requires being clued in enough to recognize the strategic value and focused enough to then make it happen. If you look at the timing, this was shortly after they launched OS X and apparently went "what else can we do with this?" (IOS is based on the same architecture).

Corporate R&D labs are where this stuff gets parked by companies that are too impatient to wait for that. That's exactly what happened in Nokia.

interestingly, before shareholder-value primate reaching the last exec, the companies with big research units were economic and innovative powerhouses. E.g. think of the Olivetti corporation (which sadly died after it's leading personel exited.)

Shareholder value capitalism was only ever an aspiration.

In practice companies have always been run for the benefit of corporate insiders. Not the widows and orphans who might own a few stocks.

Please could you share your education, position(s) and experience? While reading your comment I am not sure whether you’re just quoting from some book, or if it is first hand insights/knowledge (it sounds like the second, so it’d be valuable to add the above if so).

> That requires being clued in enough to recognize the strategic value and focused enough to then make it happen.

Certainly investor confidence in your / your companies ability to do this, and this matching their investment goals is also a factor..

These 2 exaples are wildly hailed in media worldwide as 'innovators', and are able to get long term strategic funding to innovate. Most CEOs aren't, and can't. Not sure the cause, but certainly a factor somehow.

Apple had their own research lab from 1986 to 1997. Steve Jobs closed it when he re-joined Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou...

And they were quite productive:

> Apple's ATG was the birthplace of Color QuickDraw, QuickTime, QuickTime VR, QuickDraw 3D, QuickRing, 3DMF the 3D metafile graphics format, ColorSync, HyperCard, Apple events, AppleScript, Apple's PlainTalk speech recognition software, Apple Data Detectors, the V-Twin software for indexing, storing, and searching text documents, Macintalk Pro Speech Synthesis, the Newton handwriting recognizer,[5] the component software technology leading to OpenDoc, MCF, HotSauce, Squeak, and the children's programming environment Cocoa (a trademark Apple later reused for its otherwise unrelated Cocoa application frameworks).

Here are some blog posts by ATG's Jim Miller giving some background on concepts such as Data Detectors.

https://www.miramontes.com/writing/

From what I understand, after reading through Musk's biography, he is not a typical 'research' oriented person. A typical researcher is focused on refining a body of work that is already at the precipice of cutting edge. This research first mindset is about pushing the boundaries of research and the most efficient way to do that is by publishing papers etc.

Musk, on the other hand is a problem first person and uses research to solve those problems. It's very different from a researchers mindset. For ex, Tesla's self driving car unit is full of researchers but they are not doing the traditional research, i.e pushing the boundaries of machine learning/computer vision. They are not there to win a research competition - ones that gave rise to Resnet etc. They are very focused on using deep learning to solve the problems of self driving.

The end goal for Musk is a product and research is a means of getting there, the end goal for a researcher is .. well research.

And people 'pushing the boundaries of machine learning/computer vision' are not there to win a research competition: they are just using linear algebra for their field of applied statistics.

of course. Also, much of the progress at least in computer vision is attributable to competitions such as Imagenet challenge. It's not my intent to downplay the importance of research or the competitions.

You hit the nail on the head with my previous experience as well. Being on the implementation side of things, my team was constantly suspicious of design ideas or mandates that had been developed by the R&D team. It was always the same litany of excuses. Something like their model doesn't reflect our implementation's reality (which would be a great problem to point out and fix if true...). In the end, it always felt like our engineers were the jocks to the R&D team's nerds, and nothing the R&D team did would be respected because they weren't building the "real" thing.

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