Corporate Pure Research

I'm not angry and I totally get your point of view. I don't think you're wrong.My belief is that the underlying issue is that most companies and their drive for quarterly results means that they won't front a bunch of the "we're not sure if this will result in anything but it's an interesting thing to look into" style of research on their own. The Bell Labs of the olden days are gone and publicly-funded R&D has essentially replaced it.It's n

Companies don't like to do basic research..It doesn't pay off for decades

What's the issue with large companies plowing their profits into pure research?

I do not believe those institutions are lacking in funds for research. Even if they get more funds, they will still be incentivized to do R&D only on high-potential opportunities with high probability of product development success. Shareholders wouldn't care to let them just spend money just anywhere and waste it.

Yes! Let’s direct all research by the behest of large corporations! Of course there is no intrinsic value in research unless it’s producing value for the market! Absolute dollar value is the only measure of value! The market is well known to accurately favour niche research and development that can accumulate over time to fundamental breakthroughs instead of short term profits!

Why should I invest in R&D then

It seems to be difficult to turn the pure research back into new products. Apple famously got lots of ideas for free from Xerox PARC. Google researchers wrote the Attention Is All You Need paper and they're now desperately playing catchup because they couldn't convert it to any kind of product. There's nothing wrong with companies investing in pure research, but these large companies sometimes are unable to take advantage of the research. The people running the business want to ke

Blue sky research should be open. Last mile product development and products themselves can be closed source. Else, how do you create profits and value for shareholders? So far, except Apple, the others have made the outputs of their research labs open: published papers, demos, packages like TensorFlow, etc. Besides, there is a division of labor: govt, with its altruistic mission does open blue-sky research. Companies, OTOH maximize profits and the good ones that can afford to, also do open basi

Wouldn't academic research still persist? Or has that also moved to a can't patent or profit from it, no interest in furthering research mindset?

We need to understand companies do two kind of R&D , one is where company try to enhance their current offering to ensure that they remain on the cutting edge of the current lot (Maps, Search, UI based R&D in apple are examples of it), while other side of R&D explore other opportunities in CS and try to break new grounds. These R&D require more budget and are of experimental nature. In result , the first kind of R&D produce better results in terms of money spend but provide a