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I'd point out at that Ginni Rometty was a bad CEO, but that doesn't mean that people there didn't do good research. Like, they're pretty unrelated. Research and
by abakker 3y ago
I'd point out at that Ginni Rometty was a bad CEO, but that doesn't mean that people there didn't do good research. Like, they're pretty unrelated. Research and Development is notoriously hard to commercialize. Over here in HN land, we just say that product market fit is poor or that products didn't get traction, but those are just as akin to R&D as anything.
A better model was that Rometty was not good at choosing what to fund and which bets to make. kinda a failed VC fund.
- sidewndr46 3y agoWhat good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? To me, that is just good research followed by bad development. No one investing in IBM is expecting it to be a public works project. Lookup the saga of HP's memristor followed by "The Machine" for a similar story.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos We can also throw out most psych, social science, archeology, and history R&D, too.
- willcipriano 3y ago> We can also throw out most psych, social science Yes.
- anthk 3y agoFirst at all, they had to be called 'sciences'. They aren't.
- pinewurst 3y agoNLS came from SRI not Xerox PARC. NLS was in fact commercialized and sold by Tymshare.
- smcin 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system) Fun fact: funded by ARPA
- fallingknife 3y agoWould love to know what the last major breakthrough in social science / psych R&D was. Archeology / history, on the other hand, definitely have some pretty awesome finds.
- abakker 3y agoMaybe UBI? I mean, hard to say it's been tested enough, but that feels like an answer to this question.
- dralley 3y agoAlso 2000 years of Mathematicians talking about Prime Numbers before someone came up with the idea of cryptography using prime numbers. And the laser, which took a few decades to find an application.
- 6510 3y ago> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? It attracts playful wizards. If you get enough of those no amount of zombies can beat them.