Waldo Jaquith
I’m reading a history of the development of the transistor, and I’m struck by the fact that some of the most important quantum physics research in the world was happening at Bell Labs, in the 1930s and 1940s, in service of improving telephony.
Is there any equivalent of this today? Is any major corporation funding Nobel-winning basic scientific research as a routine business practice?
Waldo Jaquith
@emilygorcenski PARC is what prompted me to mention this. It’s amazing to me that Xerox once did cool stuff. I only know them as a boring company that makes boring machines and bad software for government.
rrmutt
@waldoj @emilygorcenski Liddle's Law, coined by David Liddle, head of PARC (and Interval Research): "A company big enough to have a research lab is too big to know what to do with the results."
rrmutt
@waldoj @emilygorcenski Xerox, for a good while, held the patents on xerography and was a defacto monopoly like Bell Labs. They were making gobs of money back when it was not cool be a monopoly, so just like Bell Labs, they burned a lot of it on research, with resulting tax credits.
rrmutt
@emilygorcenski @waldoj Amazing and true. I worked for a research lab (FXPAL) funded by Fuji Xerox, on the PARC model. Took me years to realize that Fuji Xerox was relying on the R&D tax credits, so they would sabotage inventions that got anywhere close to commercialization. Fun while it lasted, though!
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