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Google, Microsoft, Sun to Fund New Internet Lab
brajesh writes "Yahoo! News has an AP story about Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems coming together to back a new Internet research laboratory aimed at helping entrepreneurs introduce more groundbreaking ideas to a mass audience. The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems or RAD lab is scheduled to open Thursday and will dole out $1.5 million annually over five years, with each company contributing equally. From the article : 'Conceivably, the lab's services could help launch another revolutionary company like online auctioneer eBay Inc. or even Google, which has emerged as one of the world's most valuable companies just seven years after its inception in a Silicon Valley garage.'"
I'm curious what these people will come up with. I just hope it's not more of that Web 2.0 pie-in-the-sky.
.... and the lab will be evil and not evil in the same time!
Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems coming together to back a new Internet research laboratory aimed at helping entrepreneurs introduce more groundbreaking ideas to a mass audience ...so they can buy the rights to it, lock it down, and make it proprietary to their platform.
It's the American Idol of developers. "We'll let you show off, decide who's best, sign them to a nasty license, and own your soul."
(Kidding, but only half.)
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
That's chump change to Microsoft and Google (I don't know about SUN). Why aren't any one of them just funding the whole lab themselves? It's great that Berkely is getting some needed funding, but I think that this may some sort of PR thing. Just my 5 cents.
Most "revolutionary" companies have been launched by going against "common wisdom" and doing thigs different ways than everyone else. Thus getting "help" early on from big companies.. well.. you draw the conclusions..
Err no? Surely the whole point of Microsoft, Sun, Google etc, forming this lab, is to STOP such an independent company from forming?
Sun, Google and Microsoft... in bed?
Hahhaha, next thing apple with bring out intel based macs... oh you editors you really get me going. hahah.
Imagine how many chair throwing tantrums there will be...
please type the word in this image: aperture
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
a desktop search tool that runs on all platforms, but crashes every 5 minutes.
* ducks *
So for $2.500.000 each they will get access to the brightest ideas concerning the internet in the next 5 years... Is it just me or is that the bargain of the century?
I propose to gather the world's greatest minds to generate memorable, unpatented acronyms for the IT industry.
I'm sure the person hours lost to coming up with yet another acronym for yet another venture must run into the gazillions of dollars per year. Charges for my companies services will be slight by comparison.
So where's my 1.5 mill?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Egad! An Axis of Evil!
"We realize if research isn't being done in university laboratories," he said, "then the pipeline of ideas and computer science graduates coming into our companies eventually is going to dry up."
I hate to say it but I somewhat disagree, now that web hosting has gotten so cheap most can be done in there home/dorm, most just need the drive and the idea of what they want to do.
The best thing these companies could do to encourage innovation would be to pressure the USPTO to abolish software and business method patents. The way things are playing out, I'm going to be dropping offline for good within the decade. One of the first to tune in and one of the first to tune out, I see a new trend emerging!
Where do you want to not be evil today? On the SUN!
It cost over a trillion dollars to create the Internet.
$1.5 million sounds like a honeypot, not a venture-capital firm...
They're sucking in neophytes who will sign over IP rights and get very little in return.
oh, errr.. nevermind. that's 1.5 million. woopty.
Google, Sun, and Microsoft... hmmmm GSM... next thing you know, T-Mobile will be involved
poffttt!! Why are people looking for conspiracies? This is cheap at twice the price. Getting all those ideas pushed to them for the little money they spend on the lab? Yes, this is not unlike the police setting up a training school for thiefs so they can catch the graduates...
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Sorry, I'm not seeing it. As near as I can tell, this is a "cheap" way to kill threats in the cradle and steal new ideas.
Call me cynical, but look at the history of these companies before you do it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Damien
Will Google be asking for the chairs to be screwed to the floor in this new lab?
Move along. This is a Berkeley research lab funded by various sources. There are plenty of labs with similar funding. My academic research lab is funded by IBM, Sun, and Intel. Whoopee! Absolutely does not mean there is any kind of alliance.
all we need now are four horsemen, and a Babylonian whore, and we've got us the Apocalypse!
whether to expect nothing from it as being merely a PR stunt, or be very afraid...
Trust me, I work for the government.
...and I don't think the link is pointing to the right place, either.
Sun Search
Sun Maps
Sun Earth
Sun Blogger
Sun Froogle
Sun Groups
And so on...
While you're at it, how about adding 'dictionaries' to that list?
This is no different than when Sun announced working with ATT on a single unix standard. I wonder what fruits will come from this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Silicon valley garage? I know the image of a tech company starting in a Silicon Valley garage may be somewhat romantic, but didn't Google start in a Stanford lab?
Oh well, the IT industry never made sense, why should it start now.
On the other hand, idiotic alliances to fund startups. Hmmm do I smell a bubble?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
so the lab's servers will run with Microsoft IIS on a Linux box and none of the services / software / innovations will be made available for the Linux community.
I think on the other hand that it serves a dual purpose: it allows large companies to step outside of the "not invented here" syndrome and really scrutinize ideas that may be suppressed in their own corporate cultures, and, for the person who has the idea the pay is acceptable - take a million dollars guaranteed without taking all the risk in actually bringing the product to market and hoping it pans out. Overall I agree that the large companies have little to lose but I don't neccessarily agree that the money offered to the developers is too little.
Shh.
Google: set up a creative environment to help developping new ideas
Microsoft: copy those ideas and implement them in their upcomming OS
Sun: rewrite them in Java and release them as Open Source ten years later
The True FOSS Skype Replacement
All I can say is WOW. I would have never guessed that MS and Google would be teaming up to complete ANY task.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
what a joke..
to create another eBay, Google, etc....all you need is the following:
- geek(s)
- development computers
- web hosting
That's it. If you have a good idea, go and implement it. Don't fall for this trap....as these are the same companies you'll be competing against no matter what you do in software/internet field. They want to find you and bury you as soon as they can.
All the web companies are sooo vulnerable to the 'two guys in a garage' thing.
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Very smart from Microsoft: keep the competition close, prepare for the next backstab. I'm not sure what the other two gain as a benefit from the deal, though.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
... But I can't afford a house with a garage.
And what if there's nothing behind the door until it is being opened?
RAD - Research And Development
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I've heard this before, when VISA and MASTERCARD got together to create the one and only mobile payment system, with very limited funding. Which didn't go anywhere because it was underfunded and thus non-committed to by its founder members.
/coralsaw
These people, Google MS and Sun, won't even spit on the ground for $1.5 mil, let alone create a business plan... If they really intended to go beyond window dressing, they should have put their money where their mouth is and pour some real money into it.
It's an intended failure from the word go.
<before>now</before>
Throwing money at inventors to make them innovate faster is similar to throwing money at monkeys to make them evolve faster. The process of invention is very organic... inventions, products, and business ideas respond well to having money thrown at them...usually, but actual discovery does best with long term support and development... not rapid cash with little supervision.
pinky in mounth: one ... MILLION ... dollars!
I mean, this whole article reads as a joke?
Yahoo reports their competitor Google is entering into a partnership with Microsoft and Sun (two companies that have been feuding for the last decade). Microsoft cooperating with Google (or any company that isn't paying them licensing cheques)?
I'd check the credentials on this one.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Looks like they're trying to come up some fancy-schmancy approach to network management, emergency handling and risk control. It would make sense all three of these orgs would be interested in refining techniques along those lines, but pardon me while I yawn.
Yeah, gimme U$ 1,500,000.00 (the amount of money google raised before starting) so I can open a business in my fucking garage. Duh.
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Ok, so why doesn't this group spend $1.5 million giving computers to kids who can't afford them? After all, for $1k or less, a kid could have a maxed-out Linux box and learn C++, Java, etc. Isn't there a shortage of software-related talent now? Why are these companies blowing their money on a research lab when they could be capturing the next generation? (BTW, is any of this $7+mil actual cash money, or is it just full-market-price proprietary software donations?)
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but for some reason I thought each of these companies (well, perhaps not Sun) has a division that already does what RAD does, but with much better funding.
Okay, am I the *only* one who had a massive (and somewhat painful) flashback to the 1980s when I saw "RAD"? All that I could think of while reading the summary was the bad lingo of the time.
This new RAD thing is, like, you know, totally gnarly! It's just, like, a rad RAD! But it's got, like, Microsoft? Oh, totally gag me with a spoon! At least having Sun and Google, like, makes me, you know, feel kinda warm and cozy -- like when I've got my leg warmers on, right? Like, that is so-o-o weird, you know? Like, oh my god!
*shudder*
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
The issue here is that what ends up becoming a phenomenon (like Google or E-bay), often start out as mere curiosities. I'm not sure that either of them set out at the very beginning to make something that would become wildly popular. What's more, I'm not sure you can buy this- it just sort of happens. It is my opinion that more often than not, the depth of one's pockets is irrelevent.
Several commentors are worried that funding from these sources implies inevitable corruption of the effort into a proprietary product owned by The Big Guys. One poster sees a contradiction there and wonders why, at this funding level, one company didn't just fund the whole thing (rather than Google joining Microsoft et al.)
Don't panic. There seem to be a few things going on here:
1) The principle investigators for this project are basically intellectual "hubs". Stunning track records. Long histories of students who go on to "move and shake". Perhaps most importantly: active involvement with people from all over the industry. If you want a group that simultaneously has its fingers on the pulses of both industry and academia and has a far better grasp of both fundamentals and how to systematically move forward in good directions, you could do a whole lot worse. The point: this is, to a degree, a "write your own ticket" group of researchers and they wisely elect to go for independence and diverse funding sources. The Big Companies may be big but this crowd is a bit more immune than most to being bullied. Everyone involved knows and embraces that.
2) At the levels of management where funding decisions like this are initiated and made, people are not so out of touch as the average slashdotter is likely to think. Oh sure, they have blind spots. But they are not stupid. They've seen Internet service industry growth increasingly coming from garage projects -- almost to the point that that's the only place it comes from. They do what they can to systemize and potentiate entrepreneurial skunksworking internally but they also know the social and economic limitations of management. Importantly (as can be seen by acquisitions, for example), they know that they need to rely on many, many other people making the up-front R&D investments, most failing, and a few becoming targets for acquisition. One aspect of RAD is that it envisions radically lowering the costs of playing for those external high-risk investors. If today, there are 100 people trying to win the social-network/calendering war, and perhaps 1000 serious novel-network-service efforts overall, and each of these efforts costs many people-months just to get out of "coming soon" state --- an aim of this project is to bump those numbers of people by an order of magnitude or more and shrink the lead-time similarly.
3) This is how corporate investment in academic research is supposed to work (and so it's sad, really, that RAD materials describe this as a "new" model). Corporate investors specifically don't get exclusives and therefore don't invest all that much, individually. What do they get? Partly they get new ideas which, while open to all, the investors hope to be in the best position to use (or the best position to benefit from others using them). Partly (and complementing that) they get less tangible benefits like personal access to PIs and, generally, a leg up on "technology transfer [out of the lab and into the market]".
4) This funding model is an application of a Nash Equilibrium. Let's take Microsoft. They've no shortage of systems researchers that, polite rivalries aside, could be sequestered in a room and could do all of this work just fine -- at far greater expense to Microsoft. What happens if they do that? Google eventually figures out the gist of what problems they're solving and how and obtains the same results, given those hints, far cheaper (and good look trying to repair that with patents -- it just don't work that way). In general, at the bleeding edge like this, the most probable outcome for any of these companies is that they hurt themselves unless they choose a strategy that gives their competitors options other than a direct assault -- RAD is an example of such a winning strategy.
5) "There's something happening here." [Buffalo Springfield]. RAD materials don't talk about it directly and, indeed, they're taking a step-towards rather than looking
which has emerged as one of the world's most valuable companies
Is Google valuable? Certainly it's valued, as evidenced by its stock price. But when I think of "valuable", I think of its real value, e.g. what one could get by selling off the tangible assets.
This seemed like more of a point before I started typing, now not so much. Oh well, hate to waste the effort so I'm posting anyway.
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Of course Google and Microsoft are working together. When you've got a famous name like Michael Jordan on the roster, who wouldn't be enthusiastic!
Maybe I should change my name before I write a grant proposal...
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
It's like The Good, The Bad, & the Ugly.
while this might be true in some cases.. there are also other things to consider here... how many times has a Professor taken all the credit for the stuff his grad student has some. how many times do grad and undergrad students come up with really cool concepts, or prototypes of products but never get a chance to pursue them outside of the school? in this case.. everyone wins.... the students get paid for coming up with some cool stuff and a bunch of ppl get to use it. Its no different than a PHB that says he want to do this, this and this.. and you end up coming up with some really cool stuff to actually get a bunch of stuff to work. But you have no claim to it since your working for the company, and the company owns it.
Now THAT was funny! Thanks for the laugh! I know that funny doesn't give any karma, but i though that was great. The sad part is that anyone under 25 or 30 proboably won't get it unless their a fan of 80s movies.
"Most "revolutionary" companies have been launched by going against "common wisdom" and doing thigs different ways than everyone else. Thus getting "help" early on from big companies.. well.. you draw the conclusions.."
Xerox Parc would never have existed.
I haven't seen this much 'feel good' spin since M$ partnered with IBM for WarpOS.
This sounds just like the Invention Submission Corporation... ... or any other scam that wants to "pay you [a microfraction] for your great idea [that they will make _X_illions from]".
Don't buy it. If you have a great idea, persue it through the normal channels - hard work and complete confidence and persistence in your idea/IP.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.