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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.'"
.... 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..
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?
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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>
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.
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