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Comment by jmspring | Hacker News Reader

The saddest thing for me is just what an institution IBM has been for America over the years. Having gone to UC Santa Cruz, the Computer Engineering department was started by IBM alums (my advisor was Glen Langdon of Langdon and Rissanen / Arithmetic Coding fame. Other friends/faculty spent time working at IBM Almaden Research where several advances in storage technologies have been produced.

These days, IBM is in decline. Friends/tech blogs/even sites like Cringely -- http://www.cringely.com/ -- note how IBM is quickly trying to shed any semblance to it's old self in names of meeting investor expectations.

IBM isn't the only legacy company in the same situation, we have seen this happen with HP as well as AT&T over the years. Microsoft Research, Google to a point, and Xerox Parc (after a period of decline) are stepping up for some long term/basic research. But, I wonder, will we every see the hey day of IBM Research, PARC, Bell Labs, etc. ever again?

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What about Watson ?

IBM is still one of only very few companies doing truly interesting research.

I hope Watson survives, but based on what I've heard out of Almaden over the years, I'm skeptical.

Survives ? From what I hear it's already being applied to medicine.

And banking. And insurance. The list will likely continue to grow.

IBM is still one of only very few companies doing truly interesting research.

Can you qualify that? Almost every big technology company and thousands of small ones have teams of smart people conducting interesting research across many fields. Take a look at any issue of Wired or Technology Review (or the top links to HN on any given day) to see some examples.

I probably should have said "important" instead of "interesting".

How many of those companies are doing research that can be compared to what came out of Bell Labs in the 60's and 70's - the transistor, the laser, ... ?

IBM's work on advanced semiconductors and Watson certainly qualify. The later will probably be seen as one of the most important developments in the history of humanity and it wouldn't have been possible without the former.

its pretty hard to know what is important in the moment.

Not really. Lots of people knew that the laser was important, that Xerox park stuff was important, that C/Unix was important, etc even at the time they were introduced.

In the case of the laser, there may have been some sense that it was important, but at the time there were no immediate applications and it was called "a solution in search of a problem."

In Wikipedia though it says that "Gould’s notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959."

Outside of Google, Palintar, and some of the other machine learning or niche consulting companies, I see little to no research on problems as hard and potentially influential as those that IBM or HP work on. The big reason you don't see what they do is that they don't work on consumer facing products very often.

The companies whose work I see at CS conferences and in patent searches for core algorithmic techniques are mostly IBM, HP, Microsoft, and Google. The majority of companies that are in the top links on HN on a given day do not do interesting research of the type IBM is doing.

Further, there is a lot of reinventing of the wheel going on in the startup scene these days. Just look at "new" things like in memory databases, column stores, event driven frameworks (Node.js) and others. All of these things are many decades old and do not count as new research even though they are newly written implementations. They may be more approachable to the common developer than the decades old implementations, and that has value, but this is not "research".

Among the other achievements of IBM I would like to mention the 4 Nobel prizes(3 in Physics):

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/awards.shtml

Don't forget Microsoft is also pushing the envelope. Their showcase says it all ... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/channelDetails.aspx...

Check your link? That URL returns a server error.

/drum-drum

Don't worry jmspring, Belphegor[1] may be slumbering, but he is alive and well.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belphegor

It appears that your view of IBM, and other tech companies in general, are skewed to some degree:

> "These days, IBM is in decline. Friends/tech blogs/even sites like Cringely -- http://www.cringely.com/ -- note how IBM is quickly trying to shed any semblance to it's old self in names of meeting investor expectations."

I believe that is referred to as resource allocation/shifting. All corporations do this, not just IBM. It's not necessarily a bad thing nor good thing, it just is.

> "But, I wonder, will we every see the hey day of IBM Research, PARC, Bell Labs, etc. ever again?"

Simply browsing the technology/science sections on Google News will show what research companies like IBM, Google, etc. are involved in. Sure, Watson is the first thing people think of when they hear of IBM, but that's not their only endeavor. Just off the top of my head, last I read IBM was undergoing research in the areas of quantum computing and optimized processor fabrication techniques.

I'm not saying they still aren't doing research, but the level of research today is no where near what is was during their hey day. Furthermore, IBM, itself, is continuing to move away from the IBM of old and more towards being just a global services firm.

Given its size, any change at IBM will not be immediate, but it has been more in decline than rising.

IBM does quite a bit of research, they just don't blog or tweet about it all the time. Example of just one of their labs, right in the Silicon Valley foothills: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/almaden/welcome.html

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