6 ms·

The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs

71 points by yorp 12y ago

greggarious 12y ago
This article seems a bit hyperbolic. Yes, the Silicon Valley branch has shut down, but MSR's main office in Washington is still open and doing great research. It's probably the best industrial lab that's still running. I also have interned at PARC (no longer "Xerox PARC", but still kicking). I was given remarkable freedom both by my direct supervisor and the division manager. Down the road, HP labs was still going (though a few of their staff had migrated to PARC). Likewise, IBM and Bell Labs still are going. And Google seems to be really spinning up their research. I won't comment on specifics in a public forum, but I've noticed signals that they're taking basic research seriously. (They used to be very short term, product oriented)
- anonetal 12y ago
  I agree that MSR is probably the best CS industrial lab out there right now, but I think Moshe's point is that even the rest of the MSR is probably a bit wary right now given what (and how it) happened to MSR SV. I don't think HP, IBM, and Bell Labs (with a few specific and localized exceptions) are doing basic research as they were doing a few years ago (or in Bell Lab's case, a few decades ago). Maybe you are right about Google, but generally speaking, there are very few papers from Google Research (relative to their strength).
  - DrDimension 12y ago
    Agree. It matters because nothing undermines scientific integrity and productivity like financial insecurity.
- Qworg 12y ago
  There's also many other MSR labs in many other places: China, Cambridge, Israel, Egypt, Munich, others. Redmond is the just the biggest. I believe that the SV cut was the right choice vs. "spreading the pain around", but we'll see how it shapes up in the end.
- walshemj 12y ago
  And not all RnD labs are CS the same retreat from RnD can be seen in a branches of STEM unfortunately.
sgnelson 12y ago
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181626-the-rise-and-fall-of-industrial-research-labs/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181626-the-rise-and-fal... For those of us who don't want to have to read the mobile version.
- lukastsai 12y ago
  https://getscroll.com/r/h1h6t https://getscroll.com/r/h1h6t
jacquesm 12y ago
I think it's more that the low hanging fruit has been plucked than that there is a 'fall' of industrial research labs. Just like with technology in the early 20th century there was a golden age where advances were relatively quick and dramatic because the fields were brand new. Once the field matures it takes more effort to get up to speed on what has already been learned and evolutionary progress rather than revolutionary takes over. And so far we seem to be doing pretty good with that level of progress. Any faster than this and I'm not sure we'd be able to properly integrate technology into our culture and society before it had become obsolete already. Just look at for instance the succession of audio recording and distribution methods to get an idea of that: the gramophone record lasted for many decades, CDs succeeded them and lasted for a couple of decades, digital formats are dying out about as fast as they are being created (with the exception of mp3). At some point you're going to have problems of interoperability simply because of the speed of progress (we're seeing something quite close to that on the browser front right now).
- jonmrodriguez 12y ago
  There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in genetic engineering and robotics!
  - fest 12y ago
    Re: robotics- you mean low-hanging fruit research-wise or application-wise? I'm not closely following latest research in this area but I get the feeling that most of the focus is geared towards autonomous cooperation and nano-scale. What are other directions?
    - jonmrodriguez 12y ago
      Application-wise :) Mostly I'm thinking that with cheap 3D-scanning sensors and GPUs, it's finally the beginning of the era for domestic and consumer robots to be viable.
- aragot 12y ago
  To explain this acceleration of technology, let's remind the exponential growth of population: There are more people on Earth than dead population since the birth of times So there's as much potential for science advance in 1 lifespan as since the wake of Humanity.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Being in technology, you have a front-row seat to the concept of elective decline, or the idea that civilization's decline is often a collective but intentional choice, rather than the result of external stress. It seems sad, to a historian, that a great empire would "collapse" (an affair that usually happen imperceptibly over hundreds of years) but the reality is that it's the unintended product of millions of individuals making self-interested and possibly self-beneficial decisions... that end up not keeping up or advancing the civilization. At some point, they just decide that it's not worth it to be civilized anymore, and investment ceases. Since the 1970s, we've seen elective decline in the U.S., in science, and in technology. Abstractly people want scientific progress, but no one wants to pay for it, and people within the masses would rather be guided by their resentment of academics than fight back when academic or research jobs get cut. When state legislatures cut funding for public universities, the hoi polloi don't care because their resentment for professors is stronger than their sense of a need to keep up the society. One might hope for Silicon Valley to be better, and look to it for leadership, and it may have kept its integrity for longer, but the current "M&A has replaced R&D" era is just fucking disgusting. It's easy to focus the hatred on a few unlikeable celebrity founders (and I've done my share of that) but the truth is that the problem is really deep and probably unalterable. We have a front-row seat, if we work in science and technology in the U.S., for elective decline-- why it happens, the individual actors who push it forward (not wanting decline, but valuing self-interest more), and the often one-way erosion of trust that tends to make it irreversible-- but we have no power to change it. And, just as one might read about a civilization that collapsed 3,000 years ago and think, "They would have been fine if they just <X>", we can easily come up with solutions that will work but never see implementation, because (as seems to be a constant of human organizations) the wrong people are in charge.
- pm90 12y ago
  Yes, its pretty sad to see the demise of industrial labs doing more fundamental research, but this might be related to the demise of the big corporations in general. The HN community understandably hates the bigger companies for being monopolies and stifling innovation and whatnot, but there are two sides to the story. A large corporation, with bigger revenues, can think longer term, and invest in basic research so as to promote efficiency and/or develop technologies to give it a competetive edge. I believe Bell Labs was invented for this reason: the exact story escapes me, but they asked a scientist to help them out with one problem, and then kinda realised it might not be a bad idea to have a bunch of these scientists around, just doing their research, to perhaps be occasionally available to help the engineers with the problems they face. I do see a lot more cooperation between the Industry and University though. And as we enter an era of smaller corporations, the burden of industrial research might shift to consulting/academic sponsorship programs instead.
Zigurd 12y ago
I'm usually on the side of pointing out the squishyness in some numbers, like US productivity and GDP. But we seem not to be in a crisis or even decline in corporate research. Microsoft and Google and, to a limited extent Facebook have taken over from IBM and Xerox and Bell Labs. The Bell Labs business model was highly artificial, and that artificiality was used as an argument not to break up AT&T. Current structures are more sustainable. Some ways of structuring corporate research are new: At Google, and at startups funded by Founders Fund, you will find R&D that's been selected for impact.
- angersock 12y ago
  Bell Labs got us microwave communications, lasers, transistors, Unix, C, awk, Plan 9, fiber optics, and a bunch of other things. The new "sustainable" structures, frankly, aren't even a substitute.
DrDimension 12y ago
Why fritter away all that money on fundamental scientific research when you can spend 2.5 billion for fucking Minecraft?

71 points by yorp 12y ago

This article seems a bit hyperbolic. Yes, the Silicon Valley branch has shut down, but MSR's main office in Washington is still open and doing great research. It's probably the best industrial lab that's still running. I also have interned at PARC (no longer "Xerox PARC", but still kicking). I was given remarkable freedom both by my direct supervisor and the division manager. Down the road, HP labs was still going (though a few of their staff had migrated to PARC). Likewise, IBM and Bell Labs still are going. And Google seems to be really spinning up their research. I won't comment on specifics in a public forum, but I've noticed signals that they're taking basic research seriously. (They used to be very short term, product oriented)

anonetal 12y ago
I agree that MSR is probably the best CS industrial lab out there right now, but I think Moshe's point is that even the rest of the MSR is probably a bit wary right now given what (and how it) happened to MSR SV. I don't think HP, IBM, and Bell Labs (with a few specific and localized exceptions) are doing basic research as they were doing a few years ago (or in Bell Lab's case, a few decades ago). Maybe you are right about Google, but generally speaking, there are very few papers from Google Research (relative to their strength).
- DrDimension 12y ago
  Agree. It matters because nothing undermines scientific integrity and productivity like financial insecurity.
Qworg 12y ago
There's also many other MSR labs in many other places: China, Cambridge, Israel, Egypt, Munich, others. Redmond is the just the biggest. I believe that the SV cut was the right choice vs. "spreading the pain around", but we'll see how it shapes up in the end.
walshemj 12y ago
And not all RnD labs are CS the same retreat from RnD can be seen in a branches of STEM unfortunately.

sgnelson 12y ago

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181626-the-rise-and-fall-of-industrial-research-labs/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181626-the-rise-and-fal... For those of us who don't want to have to read the mobile version.

lukastsai 12y ago
https://getscroll.com/r/h1h6t https://getscroll.com/r/h1h6t

jacquesm 12y ago

I think it's more that the low hanging fruit has been plucked than that there is a 'fall' of industrial research labs. Just like with technology in the early 20th century there was a golden age where advances were relatively quick and dramatic because the fields were brand new. Once the field matures it takes more effort to get up to speed on what has already been learned and evolutionary progress rather than revolutionary takes over. And so far we seem to be doing pretty good with that level of progress. Any faster than this and I'm not sure we'd be able to properly integrate technology into our culture and society before it had become obsolete already. Just look at for instance the succession of audio recording and distribution methods to get an idea of that: the gramophone record lasted for many decades, CDs succeeded them and lasted for a couple of decades, digital formats are dying out about as fast as they are being created (with the exception of mp3). At some point you're going to have problems of interoperability simply because of the speed of progress (we're seeing something quite close to that on the browser front right now).

jonmrodriguez 12y ago
There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in genetic engineering and robotics!
- fest 12y ago
  Re: robotics- you mean low-hanging fruit research-wise or application-wise? I'm not closely following latest research in this area but I get the feeling that most of the focus is geared towards autonomous cooperation and nano-scale. What are other directions?
  - jonmrodriguez 12y ago
    Application-wise :) Mostly I'm thinking that with cheap 3D-scanning sensors and GPUs, it's finally the beginning of the era for domestic and consumer robots to be viable.
aragot 12y ago
To explain this acceleration of technology, let's remind the exponential growth of population: There are more people on Earth than dead population since the birth of times So there's as much potential for science advance in 1 lifespan as since the wake of Humanity.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Being in technology, you have a front-row seat to the concept of elective decline, or the idea that civilization's decline is often a collective but intentional choice, rather than the result of external stress. It seems sad, to a historian, that a great empire would "collapse" (an affair that usually happen imperceptibly over hundreds of years) but the reality is that it's the unintended product of millions of individuals making self-interested and possibly self-beneficial decisions... that end up not keeping up or advancing the civilization. At some point, they just decide that it's not worth it to be civilized anymore, and investment ceases. Since the 1970s, we've seen elective decline in the U.S., in science, and in technology. Abstractly people want scientific progress, but no one wants to pay for it, and people within the masses would rather be guided by their resentment of academics than fight back when academic or research jobs get cut. When state legislatures cut funding for public universities, the hoi polloi don't care because their resentment for professors is stronger than their sense of a need to keep up the society. One might hope for Silicon Valley to be better, and look to it for leadership, and it may have kept its integrity for longer, but the current "M&A has replaced R&D" era is just fucking disgusting. It's easy to focus the hatred on a few unlikeable celebrity founders (and I've done my share of that) but the truth is that the problem is really deep and probably unalterable. We have a front-row seat, if we work in science and technology in the U.S., for elective decline-- why it happens, the individual actors who push it forward (not wanting decline, but valuing self-interest more), and the often one-way erosion of trust that tends to make it irreversible-- but we have no power to change it. And, just as one might read about a civilization that collapsed 3,000 years ago and think, "They would have been fine if they just <X>", we can easily come up with solutions that will work but never see implementation, because (as seems to be a constant of human organizations) the wrong people are in charge.

pm90 12y ago
Yes, its pretty sad to see the demise of industrial labs doing more fundamental research, but this might be related to the demise of the big corporations in general. The HN community understandably hates the bigger companies for being monopolies and stifling innovation and whatnot, but there are two sides to the story. A large corporation, with bigger revenues, can think longer term, and invest in basic research so as to promote efficiency and/or develop technologies to give it a competetive edge. I believe Bell Labs was invented for this reason: the exact story escapes me, but they asked a scientist to help them out with one problem, and then kinda realised it might not be a bad idea to have a bunch of these scientists around, just doing their research, to perhaps be occasionally available to help the engineers with the problems they face. I do see a lot more cooperation between the Industry and University though. And as we enter an era of smaller corporations, the burden of industrial research might shift to consulting/academic sponsorship programs instead.

Zigurd 12y ago

I'm usually on the side of pointing out the squishyness in some numbers, like US productivity and GDP. But we seem not to be in a crisis or even decline in corporate research. Microsoft and Google and, to a limited extent Facebook have taken over from IBM and Xerox and Bell Labs. The Bell Labs business model was highly artificial, and that artificiality was used as an argument not to break up AT&T. Current structures are more sustainable. Some ways of structuring corporate research are new: At Google, and at startups funded by Founders Fund, you will find R&D that's been selected for impact.

angersock 12y ago
Bell Labs got us microwave communications, lasers, transistors, Unix, C, awk, Plan 9, fiber optics, and a bunch of other things. The new "sustainable" structures, frankly, aren't even a substitute.

DrDimension 12y ago

Why fritter away all that money on fundamental scientific research when you can spend 2.5 billion for fucking Minecraft?