Matt Welsh (ex Harvard Professor, now at Google) on the phasing out of Intel's "Lablets", which were a new kind of company-supported research center that was co-located with major universities. His blog post title notwithstanding, this doesn't seem to be about Intel moving away from research in general, just this particular model of heavy university interaction.

I don't want to comment directly on his post (see disclaimer below), but I'm posting this because there are a lot of interesting comments on his site, including some people sharing their views from inside other industrial labs. Welsh suggests that industrial research is on the wane and that Google's model of advanced development is the future, and others chime in to say that research is alive at many companies, some more directly focused on (read: paid for by) product groups than others.

Update: See also the comments on the post at Hacker News, in particular this long one by NY_USA_Hacker, who is continuing his (?) tradition of posting marathon irreverent comments about the value of a PhD, and advocating mathematics PhDs over computer science, even for tech folks.

The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.

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