Nathan Myhrvold, a former top Microsoft researcher, has blasted IBM and AT&T for retreating from basic, long-term research.
Speaking at Technology Review"s Emerging Technologies Conference on the campus of MIT in the US, Myhrvold said IBM and AT&T Bell Labs are doing some good work, but they are "shadows of their former selves".
IBM views its mission as the "near-term health" of the company, which is a "disastrously stupid thing to do," said Myhrvold. With IBM collecting billions of dollars a year in patent and technology licensing, the "rational thing to do if you are running IBM" would be to "shut the rest of it down and do research", he said.
AT&T"s Bell Labs is in an even more dire financial position, with most of the company losing money while long-term patents provide hundreds of millions of dollars, Myrhvold said.
Myrhvold, a 14-year Microsoft veteran who is now managing director of Intellectual Ventures, a private entrepreneurial firm based in the US, said Silicon Valley has not created great research labs. He said Microsoft, which has more than 600 employees in Microsoft Research, is an exception. "If Oracle and Cisco and other companies created research labs of that size and that kind of focus, our whole industry would be better," he said.
"Research is the kind of thing where the tide lifts everybody"s boat," he said. "Going from the unknown, uninvented and undiscovered to the answer is a huge value for everyone."