08.06.03
Research & Distraction
When it comes to advancing human knowledge, adjudicating the law, or fostering innovation, tenure certainly has its perks. By insulating practitioners from the distractions of political parties or the short-term demands of investors, tenure can provide a degree of constitutional continuity, or the kind of atmosphere that enables researchers to create out of the box. Who could imagine life today without Bell Labs’ serendipitous discovery of the transistor, or Xerox PARC’s invention of the GUI?
The peril of tenure is irrelevance, or worse. In the legal system, it can perpetuate bad doctrine, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1892 Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling that prolonged the agony of racial segregation for three more generations. In the technology world, the disconnect between research and product development helped cultivate the kind of inertia that led AT&T, IBM, and Xerox to their near- death experiences (and from which AT&T hasn’t recovered).
We recently spent the day as IBM’s guest at their fabled Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Their carefully reinforced message: Basic R&D continues, but increasingly, the research agenda is being driven by product development and vice versa. Documenting their success, IBM pointed to several recent wins, from the ethereal (Web Fountain, essentially, a Google with semantics) to the mundane (business process templates for WebSphere Business Integration). And they boasted of the revolving door that is now shuttling professionals back and forth between the labs and product development.
IBM’s subtext — that the classic pure exploratory research model no longer works — was pointed at Microsoft, whose focus on basic R&D is backed by 8% funding and 15% headcount increases this year alone.
IBM is oversimplifying the argument. By contrast, we see this as a corporate life cycle issue: To get great product innovation, you need the basic discoveries first, so you can have something truly unique to bring to market.
IBM is obviously a more mature organization, we’re already aware of their research depth, but need convincing that R&D is producing tangible results. Conversely, Microsoft is the baby on the block. Every morning when we boot up, we witness their market power before our very eyes. But innovation? DOS and most of Microsoft Office were acquired. Apple commercialized GUIs first. Their most original innovation was Visual Basic, the tool that opened programming to musicians, English grads, machinists, and just about anyone else in between. Microsoft could use more basic R&D in areas like software flaw detection or speech recognition (IBM is busy there as well).
Like its predecessors, Microsoft won’t be invincible forever. At some point, its R&D will have to “come in from the cold” or the company will encounter the same stagnation risks as its illustrious predecessors. But before bringing in the bean counters, a few “Aha’s!” will be in order.