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The State of R&D At HP, IBM, and Microsoft
jcatcw writes "Computerworld surveys the R&D efforts at HP, IBM and Microsoft ($17 billion annually) and raises the question: Are these companies supporting more long-term basic research, or just the usual short-term, product-oriented work? HP is consolidating its focus on a few 'big bet' projects in five major research areas — information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure, and sustainability. IBM has four 'high-risk' basic research areas — nanotechnology, cloud computing, integrated systems and chip architecture, and managing business integrity through advanced math and computer science. Many of the 272 research projects named at Microsoft Research's Web site are structured with major product lines like Windows, Office, or Xbox in mind, but many also seem to have no likely application to anything the company sells today."
Dear fucking god, my boss comes in at least once a week and asks me if our flagship app could run on cloud computing. Give me a gun and one bullet please.
These are businesses not institutions. They are in the business of making money via products they have mastered. Not a troll just the truth. However check out some of the better colleges and you'll find some sweet research going on. Then these big companies pay the kid 1m for the rights, patent it and make 100m off of it. Cycle of life :)
Whether research is aimed at solving an immediate problem or a problem conjured up in the mind of a scientist, it is not the technical abilities that make research useful. Any project can come up with a solution, pretty much. Rather, it is the mindset that "we are doing research" that makes the activity so productive.
By opening your eyes to all possibilities and outcomes makes even mistakes useful, and having no penalty (relatively speaking, of course) when those mistakes arise frees researchers to create and build. Instead of creating a tailored solution, they can find various solutions and even branch out into more fruitful areas if the main branch turns cold.
Having overarching themes that you want to pursue, like HP and IBM have, makes it easy for researchers to focus. On the other hand, pure research as they do at MS allows the researchers to go off in any direction that seems fruitful, even if most of the projects end up as dead ends.
...that $35 million line item in Microsoft's budget that reads "EVIL (misc.)"
These days, very little research, development and product design is done in the US. It's marketed as done in the US, but in reality, many if not most companies will order designs from no-name design firms across the dam, who specialize in delivering solutions and keeping strict NDAs. The US participation tends to be limited to those who communicate with the foreign designers.
Evidently, their lab's automated buzzword generating script is being tested.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
MS research actually does some pretty cool stuff and, more notably, that cool stuff includes things unrelated to OMG-Must-Keep-Wall-Street-Happy-This-Quarter type projects.
I fully admit that I am speaking from a small dataset; but I am inclined to suspect that good corporate R&D is perhaps the one upside to companies with more market power than is strictly desireable. Think about Bell Labs back in the day. They did loads of basic research, including such minor little projects as transistors and Unix. Compare this to our dear present day carriers, whose primary mode of "innovation" appears to be writing ever more incomprehensible contracts.
This is hardly to say that high concentrations of market power are a good thing, as R&D can be done in startups and universities and the like without all the downsides; but it does seem that high levels of market power do, somewhat, preserve R&D from being sacrificed on the altar of quarterly results.
It's usually 6 month time frame projects that are very likely to become products, not voodoo academic research. It was IPTV implementations after IPTV became big. Blu-Ray demos after Blu-ray technology was developed. iPOD syncing after iPods became big.
1 company does short term r&d, i.e. product development
2 govt & univ do long term research
3 take over IP of publicly funded work
4 profit !!
Absolute statements are never true
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Didn't researchers at HP recently discover how to build memreistor's? That isn't a 6 month to market product and can profoundly change computing.
Thus negating the article at least for HP. IBM does work like this also it is where the Cell processor idea came from years and years ago.
MSFT does have singularity, and a few other pieces of completely random but cool tech that will break compatibility with their other offerings so they will never see the market but are still done just because.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Seriously,
These companies are so large the basic research dies sometime after the researcher gives his presentation to Marketing/Product Management.
Marketing may, actually come up with some good ideas, and send them into some Managerial circle jerk with Sales Management. After a couple of comments, the good ideas die in a perpetual Gordian knot.
The knot presents itself as:
1. No customers for new idea.
2. No budget for some new idea.
3. No "proven" market for new idea.
4. No one is willing to risk their status taking a chance at a new product.
Which leads to a tremendous waste of resources "catching up" to upstarts at a later date.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Parent poster has a narrow view of industry research. I graduated with my PhD in CS about six years ago from a top-20 university and have worked in an industry research lab. The primary output of industry research are patents, papers, and products (either new products or improving products). And the research labs at Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Yahoo are all very good at this. Take a look at the top CS conferences in the fields where these companies have a stake, and you will see that industry research contributes a large share of the paper output (e.g. SOSP, OSDI, SIGMOD, VLDB, WWW, KDD, etc.). Further, these companies are spending lots of money sponsoring a wide breadth of conferences and helping to drive fundamental research at a time when NSF funding is low. These companies should be applauded.
Microsoft R&D do make some stuff that's applicable to current products.
One clear example of that is multi-touch surfaces, that will be supported in Windows 7.
The mention that Universities and corporations are starting to work more together jives perfectly with what my supervisor has said: A lot of work in his field has been done that perhaps is a little 'too' blue sky. By working with a corporation (one of the article mentioned infact), he gets a perfect insight into what is a real problem in the real work, and what is a problem only the researchers care about.
And all of them are named "Chris" or "Barbera".
At one time Dell had a very active R&D. They employed some of the best in the industry. Now they aren't even mentioned. Once the carper baggers got into the company, R&D became a needless expense.
Yes, it is true that large companies spend some money on research. It's not the same kind of spend we used to have though, and that won't change until companies don't have to constantly scramble to post big numbers every quarter.
Since this pressure is going to be there from now on, all research will continue to focus on a product the company can sell in a very short time. (Look at multi-touch surfaces rumored to be included in Windows 7 for example.)
There are two problems that will keep this short term focus going forever. The first is that everyone depends 100% on the stock market for their retirement now -- this wasn't the case in the 60s and 70s when Bell Labs, IBM, etc. were able to invest huge amounts of money in research. The second problem is that because everyone's responsible for their own retirement, they're constantly watching the market, making it impossible for a company to think long term. If you miss your numbers as CEO for more than a quarter or two, you're fired, even if you're doing the right things long-term.
I can't imagine a CEO being able to address a shareholder meeting and explain that research is important. Everyone would start shouting "Shut up and gimme my money!"
"So, what do you think of my program?"
"I wouldn't buy this."
"You wouldn't buy it, because it's designed for engineers."
"Engineers think the same as marketeers."
"If that were true, we would still be in caves wondering if rocks were edible."
"You know, you could keep recipes on this."
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Then most important function these research projects serve is to keep smart people busy under the company's payroll. Otherwise, they would be out on their own developing competing products.
I mean, other than toys. IBM's and HP's R&D's pedigrees are superb, what with technological breakthroughs and Nobel prizes involved. What can MS's R&D stack up against that? Nothing much. In fact, MS seems to have a penchant for hiring people who have done superb research elsewhere, only to stop producing anything interesting after joining MS.
All of that research ends up in academia but not in their products.
The supposed point behind R&D is enhancing the company's future prospects, not enrich the academic community.
You haven't dis-proven (is that a word?) my argument that the R&D rarely, if ever, makes it into new things from the same company.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
is LEAN. How to get rid of American jobs.
is LEAN. How to get rid of American jobs.
Hmmm ... then what about all this stuff: http://www.research.ibm.com/areas.shtml
Or maybe IBM has secretly invented cell processor AI technology to produce scientific papers ... and "Dr. Who" Cybermen who present them at conferences ...
Note to self: buy more tinfoil, IBM Cybermen are just like totally *everywhere* ...
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
IBM does LOADS of research in materials, chip, silicon, quantum, math...and etcetera. They actually live off some real patents and some trolish stupid patents.
HP does less than IBM, but its sort-of in the same league: they do, for a big part, live of real patents
Microsoft has only patented really stupid ideas (not that the other two havent, but MS practically ONLY has patents for trolling or to "prevent" trolling).
In the end, the truth for the US, is that the government pays for R&D and the corporations profit from it. And its not a bad system at that: the gov. pays A LOT for GOOD R&D (hey, they gave the internet to the world, didnt they?), and it cannot massify it, move it to cheaper markets, comoditize it, foster competition arround the result of R&D.
Thats what the free market is for and it SORT OF works.
But... thats another discussion altogether. Ive allways thought that the IT industry is basically a trust like the old Oil Trust: they sit down and share the cake, set prices, lobby for stupid software patent laws, and the public suffers from this.
In come FOSS.... and thats going to change this ways at least for software.
NO SIG
http://www.google.com/search?q=memreistor
Congratulations, you just invented the memreistor!
What is it and what it does is up to you, but you only have 6 months to finish it, and it has to profoundly change computing!
See you in the Slashdot discussion of the announcement of the memreistor!
All that stuff is for patents to license or use as leverage against other companies. Do I really qualify as a troll if I've been LEANed from IBM?
Sun.
As far as corporate R&D for IT companies, here's my take...
Microsoft: I have no idea what they spend their billions on, and yes, they do spend a bundle on R&D. They just never have much in the way of either (a) actual products to show for it, or (b) wow technologies like HP PARC. Seriously, considering all they spend, they should be HP PARC. They're not.
IBM: Well, they do make the fastest chips on earth at the moment (POWER6), as well as tons of other things, and the best O/S on the planet (z/OS), not to mention another awesome O/S (OS/400), plus...OK, IBM does great things with R&D.
Google: See Microsoft. Seriously - they have a great search engine. Best in the world. Hands down. And also...oh wait, I guess that's it.
HP: HP has pissed away more technology they've bought than anyone else. VMS? Tru64? Alpha? And then there are things they do that are awesome - Tandem Nonstop - but never integrated into the rest of their line. ARGH! They make great printers, I'll give them that...
Sun: Really forward-thinking, great R&D. The Solaris O/S has been Microsoft's crystal ball for years. DTRACE. ZFS. Java. Even just cool implementations like Thumper. Of course, Sun can't seem to make dime one on any of this...they really do seem to have the most clueless management on earth...a pity.
Did I forget anyone?
Advice: on VPS providers
xerox parc style blue sky research is no more...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Xerox. Without them, you'd have a shorter list.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Thats "GRAMMER", You dolt.
Bet you didn't know Kelsey was a National Socialist, huh?
(When he's not pissed on Pinoqachole...)
You mean "Memristor ". Evidently, the word is too new for Google's spellchecker to be of any help.