I was gonna say, this sounds a lot like continuing the research of Dynamicland, which itself contained research from CDA, VPRI, and other groups. Why is it so hard to find a consistent funder of basic research like PARC in the 70s?
As tech nerd, I love the lore of The PARC and went to visit it as soon as I moved to the Bay Area.
However, I assume it would be taught as a lesson of what not to do in a business context:
Investing in pure research often yields innovations that are opposed to existing business lines or simply too far out to see as useful by management.
That said, many companies have research arms. Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Meta, Google…
Still, it shows my point, that research that reaches too far from the company’s core biz is difficult to recognize as a success. The laser printer, was a better printer and it was an improvement to Xerox existing scan+print business.
Bell Labs also had a lot of commercial success.
It would have been easier to just make some of the inventors upper-level managers and executives of the parent company.
Given the cost of the original Xerox computer, Apple still may have eaten their lunch. Apple itself spent a lot of effort getting the Macintosh, expensive as it was, as cheap as it was.
edit: goes without saying that the best time to take on any largely successful company is approximately a decade from when they’ve been successful. that is to say, we’re on the cusps of a better payments api (ie stripe of this decade), better email (37signal’s hey), better e-commerce, etc.
It's disturbing how little actually came out of dynamic land, and now there's a schism where the founders are pasting QR codes to hands and have as their 3rd bullet point "GPU FFI shaders"?
Does any of that scream fundamental UX research, or the future of computing?
To me, it's just another tired retread of half-baked messianic thinking that tails off into nowhere as the hero complex devolves into a series of half-baked ideas designed to scratch an individuals daily itch, rather than a central purpose.
Google had stuff like this internally for quite some time, through much later than most people would guess.
The thing is there just isn't some vastly superior paradigm sitting out there to fix computing with. The industry is mature enough that if something truly good and helpful exists, even in parts, it's quickly implemented.
One ray of light might be that the rate of change is fast enough that there are likely to be gaps emerging over the next decade.
But they're not going to be found in this sort of fashion.