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."

Comments

The nature of research

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:Narrow view

[xtracto]

I completely agree.

I was fortunate to participate in (Comp. Sci.) a research project where some industry companies worked along with some Universities. One of those companies was HP (participating via a researcher appointed to the project).

I can say from first account experience that HP was one of the companies which put more interest and time in the research (while, other unamed companies sometimes were not even present at the meetings).

From that project, I learnt several things about HP research (at least in Europe). They indeed have several projects going. A lot of those projects are however "sensitive" or secret. But you certainly can see several good publications with interesting implications coming from HP.