A Report (Financial Crisis) and an Observation (Apple)
Here is a report: the Financial Crisis Enquiry Commission has its report out on the Great Recession from 08. It is a fascinating account, one would imagine there is a lot here about network effects to model and study as (armchair) Economists.
Here is an observation: Apple is a company that nurtures and thrives on its image as an innovative company. Yet, it is surprisingly absent from the world of academia, and does not seem to support research either directly by employing a research group or vicariously via grants, or indirectly by having their employess --- Applers, is that what they are called --- attending conferences. This observation seems to say something about either Apple or Academia.
Here is an observation: Apple is a company that nurtures and thrives on its image as an innovative company. Yet, it is surprisingly absent from the world of academia, and does not seem to support research either directly by employing a research group or vicariously via grants, or indirectly by having their employess --- Applers, is that what they are called --- attending conferences. This observation seems to say something about either Apple or Academia.
Labels: aggregator
posted by metoo at 5:36 AM
9 Comments:
As they say: An apple a day keeps the (Ph)D away :-)
innovation != invention,
Apple is good at creating shiny new horse carts, but not new automobiles!
In fact if you closely examine apple products you will find only design innovation.
Also dont rely on Apple to invent something like Watson or finding cure for cancer...
E.g. look at HP's research on Mermistors or Google's research on Distributed Systems or Machine Learning or Microsoft's research on kinect or IBM's Watson or Intel's Core processors.
Apple may not support academic research much but they would be nowhere without it. Windows is an in-house product and Apple used to have its own that was also entirely in-house but it was a disaster and they abandoned it for Mach, the academic Unix re-implementation. Apple OS X runs on top of Mach OS. (That was basically the first decision made when Steve Jobs returned to Apple.)
Apple may not support the research but they seem to recognize good stuff (e.g. multi-touch) when they see it.
And, somewhat ironically, Mach OS was written by Rick Rashid, the head of Microsoft Research.
Cute. Keeps Drs away.
- Metoo
You are right. Apple \equiv innovation (!= invention). But innovation also needs research. Some of the researches are doing great innovations in other companies and writing papers about it. Apple seems like a singularity.
-- Metoo
PB: Yes, Apple definitely seems to consume research, but not feed it.
-- Metoo
Advanced Technology Group
Shut down by Steve Jobs when he went back to Google.
And by Google I mean Apple :)
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