[JustLurking2022]

The environment you describe is self-destructive, which is why it is rare throughout history.

Xerox PARC did it, and reaped almost none of the rewards for their innovation, so it perished. It only worked for Bell Labs because they had monopolistic control of telephony and could charge whatever they liked to subsidize their R&D. As soon as they lost the monopoly, it went down hill fast. Google is the closest thing to this in the past couple decades, and have seen all their investments in AI walk out the door to found competitors.

Bottom line, pouring enormous amounts of money into pure research without demanding commercialization results certainly benefits researchers (who can pick up and take their research elsewhere) but runs companies into the ground.

[linguae]

The problem with this analysis is that Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg did make efforts within Xerox to commercialize Smalltalk and related technologies. When Xerox fumbled, they went elsewhere: Alan Kay to Atari and then Apple, and Adele Goldberg founded PARCPlace. A similar story is the founding of Adobe by ex-Xerox PARC people; PostScript is the result of frustrations with Xerox’s strategy for Interpress. It wasn’t that the researchers were indifferent to or even hostile to commercialization; it’s that Xerox’s management fumbled repeatedly when it came to commercializing PARC’s research.

Unfortunately the lesson industry learned from Xerox PARC is that research needs to be more tightly controlled by the company instead of the company’s direction being influenced by the research coming out of the lab, and thus industrial research labs, at least in computing, have undergone a transformation where it’s about near-term progress in areas that are closely tied to business strategy. I’ve worked in industrial research settings for much of the past decade and have seen the last vestiges of more free research die out. I can’t think of a company that was run to the ground by its research division, and even if such examples exist, this is an indictment on management for allowing research expenditures to sink the company, not research.

Of course not all companies can afford the types of labs that Xerox and AT&T had when those labs were in their golden ages. However, I believe that the shift toward research driven toward short- and medium-term business needs, as well as academia’s focus on fundraising and publications, has effectively snuffed out unfettered research, where the only people in a position to pursue research that way are grad students with appropriate advisors and funding situations, tenured professors who are willing to take risks, and those working outside the system such as independent researchers. Where’s the next big thing going to come from if businesses are worried about the next quarter’s results and if academia has effectively abandoned freedom of inquiry in a quest for more money and prestige?