Yes, the centralized research centers of the past are dwindling - giving way to a new "open innovation" model. However, the article attributes too much to these silos the successful spawning of industries in the U.S.
I would argue that it was the open ecosystems around these research labs (e.g. silicon valley, cambridge area, etc) that are the true catalyst. These clusters continue to these day and the spirit continues. The reach is now more global.
Who is doing basic research though? Assume there is a class of ideas which will take 10-20 years to even result in a marketable product, yet the applications will be mindblowing compared to anything someone can develop in <5 years. The current startup model is not going to even touch any of those ideas.
Microsoft, for one, invests truly staggering amounts of money in basic research. So does the American defense industry -- for entirely different scales of "staggering".
The mainstream adoption of the web has carried some breakthroughs with it, but it's also held others back (witness the problems caused by people still using IE6). It's nothing new, though - a lot of seemingly novel ideas getting attention now date back to the 70s. The software industry has always been about standing on the toes of giants.
Developing ideas take so long because of the present academic ownership of research. Is there a reason why research is a monopoly of academic bureaucrats called PhDs? There is no reason for this. The best reasearchers do research for the love of it not for career. Best researchers are independent.
Freeing the research from academic domination will lead to immense advance in our knowledge. Wikipedia showed that freeing the organization of the known knowledge from the monopoly of the academic middlemen is a good thing. Let's do the same for the unknown knowledge. A research factory employing a huge number of unskilled workers trained to do one thing well (instead of an unnecessary and long academic education) will solve research problems faster and cheaper. Let's eliminate the middlemen in research.
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Yes, the centralized research centers of the past are dwindling - giving way to a new "open innovation" model. However, the article attributes too much to these silos the successful spawning of industries in the U.S.
I would argue that it was the open ecosystems around these research labs (e.g. silicon valley, cambridge area, etc) that are the true catalyst. These clusters continue to these day and the spirit continues. The reach is now more global.
Who is doing basic research though? Assume there is a class of ideas which will take 10-20 years to even result in a marketable product, yet the applications will be mindblowing compared to anything someone can develop in <5 years. The current startup model is not going to even touch any of those ideas.
Who is doing basic research though?
Microsoft, for one, invests truly staggering amounts of money in basic research. So does the American defense industry -- for entirely different scales of "staggering".
Rob Pike wrote a good analysis of the situation in 2000: "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" (http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/).
Thanks for depressing me ;-) -- by and large we're in the same sorry situation 9 years later, aren't we?
The mainstream adoption of the web has carried some breakthroughs with it, but it's also held others back (witness the problems caused by people still using IE6). It's nothing new, though - a lot of seemingly novel ideas getting attention now date back to the 70s. The software industry has always been about standing on the toes of giants.
Government programs have funded the majority of these. Haven't they?
Developing ideas take so long because of the present academic ownership of research. Is there a reason why research is a monopoly of academic bureaucrats called PhDs? There is no reason for this. The best reasearchers do research for the love of it not for career. Best researchers are independent.
Freeing the research from academic domination will lead to immense advance in our knowledge. Wikipedia showed that freeing the organization of the known knowledge from the monopoly of the academic middlemen is a good thing. Let's do the same for the unknown knowledge. A research factory employing a huge number of unskilled workers trained to do one thing well (instead of an unnecessary and long academic education) will solve research problems faster and cheaper. Let's eliminate the middlemen in research.
I wrote about this research factory here.
http://zeynel1.wordpress.com/2009/08/29/research-factory/