Kind of sad

Goodbye basic research at Bell Labs:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html

Sad. During my 3.5 year adventure at Xerox in the mid 90s they did a similar thing to PARC. An edict came down from above that all research must have application to some (near future) product. That was during the reign of Paul Allaire who later was part of a massive settlement with the SEC over fraudulent activity.

Oh, just to be clear, I was not at PARC, but in a small division that was spun out of PARC to productize several technologies. My boss came out of PARC and my group ate lunch up there every day. Neat place and the PARC forum every week was a great benefit. Don Buchla demoed his gesture based music interface there during that time.

A P

I was lucky enough to do some printed electronics research at Murray Hill under a partnership agreement in 2001. I also gave a couple of presentations there for our local IMAPS chapter. It was always a rush just being in a place where so much innovation happened. It's a shame to see it go down hill.

Like the second law of thermodynamics teaches us, the only thing constant in the universe is change.

-Chris