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Competition and pressure for quick financial payoffs are often cited
as causes of the decline in unfettered research in industry. However,
Wall Street can be remarkably sensitive to technological advances and
extremely patient in waiting for profits. This is demonstrated by the
recent initial public offering of Netscape Communications, Inc.
A company that had been in existence for less than two years, had racked
up total sales of less than $20 million, and had only losses and no
profits, was suddenly judged to be worth $2 billion. The reason was
that the Netscape Navigator browser that Andreessen, Bina, and their
colleagues built won the popularity contest among Internet users.
Several companies were pursuing the same strategy as Netscape, of
giving out their browsers for free. It was Netscape's technical
superiority that won the contest (even though this superiority was
slight, and much of the programming was of poor quality, as was shown
by the security flaws that were discovered in the Netscape program).
It will be a long time (if it ever happens) before Netscape earns
enough profit to justify its initial stock market valuation. However,
the prospects of leveraging control of the most popular World Wide Web
browser into control of Internet software were sufficiently enticing
for Wall Street that it was willing to assign an outlandish value to
this company. Thus in cases where there is a clear connection between
technical excellence and market applications, financiers can temper
their demand for profits. Hence financial pressure alone does not
explain the cutbacks in unfettered research.


The basic reason the role, style, and image of research are changing
is that there is much more research than a few decades ago. There
used to be much less competition, and the intervals between invention
and marketing of a product were long. As an example, xerography was
invented by Carlson in 1937, but it was only commercialized by Xerox
in 1950. Furthermore, there was so little interest in this technology
that during the few years surrounding commercialization, Xerox was
able to invent and patent a whole range of related techniques, while
there was hardly any activity by other institutions. This enabled
Xerox to monopolize the benefits of the new technology for over two
decades. Xerography was not an isolated case. When the transistor
was invented by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley at Bell Labs in 1948,
several years elapsed before other laboratories acquired enough
expertise in the semiconductor area to make significant contribution.
Had AT&T not been prevented both by its culture and by regulation from
exploiting this dramatic discovery, it could have erected a good argumentative essay patent
barrier around its discovery that would have allowed it to keep most
of the profits from commercial developments. Today such opportunities
are extremely rare. For example, when Bednorz and Mueller announced
their discovery of high-temperature superconductivity at the IBM
Zurich lab in 1987, it took only a few weeks for groups at University
of Houston, University of Alabama, Bell Labs, and other places to make
important further discoveries. Thus even if high-temperature
superconductivity had developed into a commercially significant field,
IBM would have had to share the financial benefits with others who
held patents that would have been crucial to developments of products.


After World War II, support for research expanded tremendously, first
in the United States, and then, as their economies recovered or
developed, in other countries. Science and technology had played a good argumentative essay
vital role in the war. The Bomb was the most famous development of
that period, but there were many others, such as radar, plastics, and
jet engines. There were also striking advances in non-military areas,
such as the almost total (for a good argumentative essay time, at least) conquest of infectious
bacterial diseases by penicillin and other antibiotics. The
technologies and products that captivated the public's attention were
the results of concentrated development efforts. (The Manhattan
Project was more of an engineering than a scientific enterprise,
although many of the best physicists, chemists, and mathematicians
spent their full war-time careers in it.) However, they were
correctly perceived to be the culminations of the unfettered research
carried out in the preceding decades. The nuclear era, for example,
is often traced back to the serendipitous discovery of radioactivity
by Becquerel at the end of the 19-th century. The policy makers and
the general public responded with an unprecedented increase in support
for scientific and engineering research. Governments proceeded to
fund extensive research and development in all areas, not only in
universities, but also at their own laboratories and through industry.
Universities vastly expanded their own commitment to research,
decreasing teaching loads, and placing more emphasis on scholarly
achievement than on teaching. Industry also proceeded to build up R&D
staffs. Under the leadership of people like Vannevar Bush [Burke],
who had bitter memories of the lean years between the wars, policy
makers allocated substantial fractions of available funding to
unfettered research, in the belief that scientists would themselves be
best able to select the most promising direction for their work.


The idea of technological progress is only a few centuries old.
Before then, all the way through the Renaissance and even a century or
two after, there was an astonishing respect and nostalgia for the
ancients. In the end, it seems that it was only the Industrial
Revolution that led to a transformation in the mindset of most people,
so that steady improvements in technology are now expected. However,
until recently, such improvements were perceived as discrete steps,
such as the invention of the Hall process for extracting aluminum or
the discovery of penicillin. Today, in contrast, we are living in a
world of constant, rapid, and to some extent predictable progress.
Microprocessors double in power just about every 18 months, in
accordance with "Moore's Law." This helps explain phenomena such as
the continued dominance of the Intel x86 architecture. In a more
stable world, with only occasional discrete steps forward, RISC chips,
which used to have double the performance of Intel x86 CISC ones for a
comparable price, would have displaced the latter ones, just as jet
planes displaced propeller-driven ones. However, in an environment
that is governed by "Moore's Law," Intel chips, just like RISC ones,
doubled in performance every 18 months, so that by sticking with the
Intel architecture, a customer only gave up 18 months, less than the
life cycle of computer equipment. (The distinction between x86 CISC
chips and RISC ones is narrowing today, but there used to be a sharp
distinction.) This allows other factors, such as compatibility, to
play the dominant role in determining what products to use.


Rapid advances in science and engineering mean there is a high return
on investment in new technology. (This does not have to mean a
sustained increase in profitability of corporations, even though Wall
Street seems to think it does. Earlier eras of large investments in
new opportunities opened up by novel technologies, such as those of
the canals, then the railroads, then cars, did not lead permanent
increases in profits. Competition saw to that. However, the penalty
for failure to adopt new technologies has been, and continues to be,
severe, as companies such as Wang Labs or Smith-Corona have
demonstrated recently. In that sense there is a high return on new
investment, as it provides a chance for an organization to survive.)
This would seem to argue for greater investment in long term research.
Paradoxically, though, it seems to have just the opposite effect.
Research is an investment in the future. It therefore requires belief
that there will be a future. A farmer will not engage in crop
rotation and other soil conservation measures if there is a high
expectation that a flood will carry all the topsoil away next year.
However, that farmer will also not invest in improving the land (or
even in cultivating it at all) if a risk-free bank deposit will earn a
guaranteed 50% return per year. High current returns mean that future
payoffs have to be discounted at high rates to get their present
values, and therefore even ventures that are expected to be very
profitable won't be attractive if their returns are far off in the
future.


The decreasing number of "big hits" is not necessarily a good argument
for cutting back on research. The story is told that somebody once
asked Einstein, "Professor Einstein, where do you get all your
wonderful ideas?" That sage replied, "I don't really know, I have
only had two or three in my life." There simply aren't that many
brilliant new insights to be had, and the easy ones have probably
already been found. Much greater effort may be an unavoidable price
to pay for technological progress. Some of the negative arguments
about research can be interpreted as arguing for greater support of
relatively unfettered investigations. For example, Section 2
discussed the evidence that in many of the areas of greatest interest
to society, research is not far ahead of the marketplace. Does this
not argue, though, that in those areas much more research is needed?
Also, Section 2 argued that research results often are difficult to
implement because of the need for industry standards, interoperability
with other systems, and related concerns. However, since this is so,
and because technology choices have such a huge impact on society, and
once made, continue to have an influence for extended periods, it is
important to do as much as possible to ensure good selections.
Industry estimates [Stewart] are that running a PC with the MS-DOS or
Windows 3.1 operating system in a business environment for 5 years
costs at least $5,000 more than a Macintosh one, which results in
unnecessary total costs in the tens of billions of dollars per year.
Does this not argue for much more research to enable better choices?


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