Just to add to your thought, Siri came from SRI Research which describes itself as: R&D and Solutions for Government and Business SRI International is an indepe

Just to add to your thought, Siri came from SRI Research which describes itself as: R&D and Solutions for Government and Business SRI International is an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institute conducting client-sponsored research and development for government, industry, foundations, and other organizations. SRI’s 2012 revenues were approximately $545 million. http://www.sri.com/work/timeline/siri http://www.sri.com/work/timeline/siri SRI spun off Siri from SRI in 2007 and Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010. There are a lot of governmental, or government-associated organizations which tend to work with a high level of long-term technical depth. Granted, those organizations generally show less/varying ability to quickly get technologies out for public use than VCs. In an ideal world, it would be nice to imagine that these long term organizations could operate on the downstream income from products benefitting from their focus. However, I think the typically the closing of that loop is through the relatively disconnected path of gov't funding: if that gov't/society benefits, and that organization can claim a link with past successes, then more gov't funding follows...