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Comment by ambicapter | Hacker News Reader

Always love it when a company can have strong technical chops even when their main product/industry isn't necessarily the tech itself.

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Yes, when people talk down on big corporations, it is stuff like this that gives me hope and I wish people could give them more credit for what they give back to society. People always ask "where is the modern Bell Labs" and I think the answer is simple: all around us.

I get the frustration of not seeing eg the next laser or transistor from a modern Bell Labs - but for a few hundred dollars an Indian teenager can build an app which could be used by a billion people using only free and open source technologies. There are so many little inventions and contributions that needed to happen for that (and many other miracles) to be possible. The physical hardware frontier has definitely matured since Bell was at their peak but we continue to make rapid progress on the software/digital front.

What is a Transistor but a smaller, more efficient, much cheaper to make Vacuum tube (in a more limited way, it's only a simple amplifier).

That path of development lead through the 'Moores Law' era to a point where with present use of physics and material science we have run out of going smaller. Maybe there's some new fundamental breakthrough that would unlock something groundbreaking... However it's going to take a lot of hard exploration of fruitless problem space to stumble across such a lead.

In the short term, in parallel, the best thing for everyone with what we do have is to refine further. Find ways of doing things with more environmentally friendly and cost effective processes. That work isn't glamorous or very profitable though, so it'd be better to fund it as a public commons / national benefit work and ensure it's exploited as an international competitive advantage (possibly shared with allied nations for their similar investments).

I mean not many private corps are publishing unbiased scientific research papers these days. I think that’s what people are referring to, an entire research division which is mainly or at least often working in the public good.

I always say "most companies today are IT companies, they just don't know it".

I would argue that Disney is definitily a big IT company and relies a lot on that tech.

Perfect storytelling might need flaweless execution to not distract. cirque du soleil for example are also experts in every single aspect relevant to their show/business. Check out the YT video from their sound manager " Inside the Sound of Cirque du Soleil: Drawn to Life" this is so crazy but it explains so much especially how they control the audiance clapping.

For me, being an "IT Company" or "Tech Company" means the tech is what drives the business decisions.

Where I work, it's a b2b service company. We've had CIOs get up and say we're a tech company, but when push comes to shove, the IT org always loses to "the business". The business solutions are what are being sold, they really don't care what the tech is under the hood... even if the tech enables every product to exist at this point.

This. In the same way that Pre 2000s Boeing was an Engineering company, driven by making a good product 'the right way'. Rather than a business company that happens to rely on engineering.

When I worked at an insurance company I heard this all the time, that we were “an IT company selling insurance”. They had 3k IT staff, more staff than any other department.

We were also still operating T1s, lotus notes, windows xp in 2014. So I always took it with a grain of salt.

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