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Inside the Labs At HP, Microsoft and IBM
alphadogg writes "At Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, investment in research and development is a reflection of corporate culture. This three-part piece by the IDG News Service examines the different approaches taken by each of these influential tech companies. Hewlett-Packard prides itself on its pragmatism, while Microsoft holds the flag of basic research aloft — and IBM continues to file more patent applications, year after year, than any other tech company."
If the goal is to create a marketable product, it is DEVELOPMENT, not research.
Research is trying to find basic things that you can use to identify areas to roll into development.
Research SHOULD fail regularly ("fail" in this sense being "did not lead to areas to develop."). If it isn't failing regularly you aren't trying hard enough.
This is the key that too many businesses now-a-days miss.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Buzzword advertising.
Ponticac: "we build excitement" (bad brakes, shitty steering)
Ford: "Quality is job 1" (their work's cut out for them)
Chevy: "Like a rock" (damned thing won't start)
Why should the computer industry be any different? If you want to know the worst qualities of any product, look at what they advertise and you'll find it.
Free Martian Whores!
One other thing I think IBM does a good job of is assuring that not only does it obtain a lot of patents, but those patents are generally of high quality, in the sense that they're real innovations that have actual value. IBM provides some significant incentives to employees to encourage patent submission, but those submissions are then vetted by a fairly skeptical evaluation committee before they're turned over to legal. Some crap patents leak through, but they're a tiny minority.
I think one of the best evidences of IBM's success in creating good patents is that IBM earns substantial revenues annually for licensing its patents, and does it without trollish behavior like submarine patents, lots of patent lawsuits, etc. IBM's patent licensees are typically happy to pay the license fees because the patents offer real value, and aren't things that the licensee would likely have independently invented. The result is over a billion dollars annually in patent licensing, which helps to offset a portion of the R&D budget.
Disclosure: I work for IBM, but not in PR and not in research. I also know of plenty of really dumb stuff the company does, but I think this is one area that IBM handles very well.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
because everyone knows that all ^nix OS's are completely free of bugs
IBM's strategy for patents is not for tech discoveries.
Most of them are for business processes. Totally unenforceable.
So why do they do it? It is the ultimate non-competition agreement.
It really only binds the guys who are on the patent so they don't go to another company and take the business process with them.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Its been a long time since I studied the output of MS basic research labs, but I remember 12 years ago being given a summary and being quite impressed. Not all of their basic research is in the computer industry per se. They had some great solid state physics modeling going on. As to actual innovations, the one I remember best is the note that Clippy, when he was first put out, was the most advanced AI-like program commercially available, and was a direct result of their basic research into AI and natural language processing. Other than that I wasn't paying attention to boring shit about the computer industry, but the interesting physics stuff they were sponsoring.
Do you even know what you're talking about? Microsoft Research is pretty much the most respected non-academic research institution in CS (at least in systems). Xerox PARC and Intel research are pretty much the only ones on the same level (though that's less and less true of PARC).
weinersmith
Can anyone name one Microsoft Research project that has significantly affected the computer industry?
Yes.
Microsoft's natural language work resulted in the grammar checker in Word, which really is parsing sentences, not just looking for common errors. Microsoft Research used to give out a program you could plug into Word which let you see the sentence diagrams.
Microsoft has for years been doing serious work in automated proof of correctness for programs. "Spec#", the proof system for C#, was a research result. Another effort in that area involved automated verification of Windows drivers to determine if they could crash the rest of the OS. That paid off. In Windows 7, every driver has to pass the static verifier before it gets signed. Verified drivers may not drive the device correctly, but they don't crash the rest of the OS. (Yes, there's a formal undecidability problem. In practice, the system can either provide a proof or a counterexample for 97% of drivers submitted. The remaining 3% are typically flaky anyway; if your kernel driver has formally undecidable semantics, it needs a rewrite.)
There's more, but that's enough for now. Microsoft really does have one of the very few pure research groups left in computer science.
One of them does research and generates patents, one of them pimps ink and Intel hardware, and one of them makes the Zune. Not sure why they tried to include them all in the same article.
Microsoft: all about being eX-Professionals.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
From TFA:
" IBM can lay claim to not only inventing the personal computer..."
I guess the writer thinks Steve Jobs invented the telephone, too.
Place nail here >+
Microsoft really does have one of the very few pure research groups left in computer science.
I am not an MS fanboi by any means, but I have to agree here. It is becoming very hard to find CS research groups doing really innovative research anymore, even in academia. DoD and NSF funding for pure CS and computational systems has, for the most part, dried up, having been diverted towards biological and weapon-oriented endeavors. The only real funding in CS is in data-mining, "autonomous vehicles", and other areas where the likely outcome is increased kill-rates - with a few bones tossed to large-scale simulation. And certainly no funding in OS and programming language technology large enough to do more than (very) small-scale experiments.
And this is sad, because the state of software has not actually improved since around 1980. We're still stepping through for-loops with debuggers rather than building workable functional and proof-based systems; symbolic AI has been killed off, leaving stochastic models with no ability to explain their conclusions; GUI's, multi-touch excepted, have not changed since then. All else is simply repackaging of old technology.
And it's a shame. Back in the seventies, there were dozens of industrial R&D labs that studied software - even medium-sized companies employing as few as a thousand people often had labs. Now we're down to about a half dozen in the US (most of who are R&D in name only - so heavily weighted towards the "D" that they are). And our research seed-corn is drying up. Fancy that... Thanks MBA's and quarterly outcome investors. You've all really helped here, together with Congress-people who, if something doesn't kill someone, don't think it merits funding. Don't worry, though. I'm sure you'll all still be OK in twenty years when we've lost all of our "innovation" because of lack of basic research to build on. It's just the rest of us little people who'll have to pay through the nose for technology that's developed in places where governments and companies still understand that funding research is worthwhile. Or maybe we'll just get lucky and hit a long global decline in new technology - I've always liked to think that that's how we'll get to the next Dark Ages.
So blessings be on Microsoft and all of the companies that still fund research. They are the few pinpricks of light glowing in an increasingly darkening sky.
That is all.
Yet IBM does still patent a shitload of actual discoveries. In fact IBM's research department(which is BTW is not the same as R&D) does research not only in IT related areas - basic applied physics, medical research, energy, etc...