Apple is a bad example; their secrecy means that humanity learns virtually nothing from most experiments. Most experiments fail -- either abject technical failu

Apple is a bad example; their secrecy means that humanity learns virtually nothing from most experiments. Most experiments fail -- either abject technical failures or merely commercially unviable at the time of their development. Hiding these away is a shame. People could learn from failures (not spending resources pursuing bad paths) or unviable explorations (revisit them later when conditions change). I think a more useful example is Bell Labs and their Technical Journal. The journal involved a more-significant level of rigor without the PR and media hype. Unfortunately, when the media follows every little happening (eg. patent publications)... big megacorps are left with two bad choices: let people draw erroneous, hyperbolic conclusions ("OMG! Ads in my eyes!") -or- address the PR and messaging directly head-on. Publication may still be the solution, but the timing issues are acute. From a business perspective, you need to be filing IP as soon as you have reasonable evidence of a proof of concept. But by the time you have sufficient material for top-tier journal peer review, those patents are already being published. The solution might be (again) something like the Bell Labs Technical Journal... but that provides a lot of fodder for competitors and patent trolls. So it's a tough balance! Either way... I applaud large organizations taking big technical risks and bets.