Yeah, it's economics. Research labs can be allowed to be independent and do whatever experimental stuff when there are resources to go around, such as when you're holding an inalienable stranglehold on an entire sector of the economy. Every decade or so there's a good chance they lay you a golden egg but mostly they're just sitting there and going to conferences in Lapland or something. When someone in government goes 'wait a minute, this is terrible' and you become just a normal company again, you kill off what doesn't immediately contribute at the expense of some foresight.
Currently leading tech research? Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, and for some ungodly reason, Elon Musk with his government grants and Teslabucks. These are all effective monopolies in several sectors to the point where dethroning any of them is going to require either a massive change in the world through new technology or extensive multi-governmental legal action. These companies have the ability to spend a lot of money on something stupid (for the ones we have seen in the public eye, see Stadia, Metaverse, Itanium, we had Plan 9 as Bell's last hurrah into the void, these types of stupid things.) which loses it for the promise of an eventual golden egg. As a theory I'd say this is a pretty good one considering that it extends well into the modern day.
Ideally, we'd probably fund research in some better way, but I have no clue how the hell that would even work. Until then, the future comes in the form of price fixing and anti-competitive practices.
Itanium I'd disagree on. It came out academia but Intel and HP really believed for whatever combination of reasons that it was the path forward although the approach had never worked before.
In general, the US probably does a decent job of funding research. Small scale research orgs within companies are often practical. There are company and government grants to both academia and commercial/academic partnerships. VCs, for their faults, do fund pretty speculative work.
For the reasons you say, big corporate research labs require conditions that are mostly not an unalloyed good at best.
Currently leading tech research? Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, and for some ungodly reason, Elon Musk with his government grants and Teslabucks. These are all effective monopolies in several sectors to the point where dethroning any of them is going to require either a massive change in the world through new technology or extensive multi-governmental legal action. These companies have the ability to spend a lot of money on something stupid (for the ones we have seen in the public eye, see Stadia, Metaverse, Itanium, we had Plan 9 as Bell's last hurrah into the void, these types of stupid things.) which loses it for the promise of an eventual golden egg. As a theory I'd say this is a pretty good one considering that it extends well into the modern day.
Ideally, we'd probably fund research in some better way, but I have no clue how the hell that would even work. Until then, the future comes in the form of price fixing and anti-competitive practices.
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