I went to the launch of Yahoo! Research Berkeley today, and heard from the lab’s leaders about the formation and purpose of the facility. It is walking distance from campus, around the corner from Downtown Berkeley BART, and staffed with a bunch of people who seem excited and interesting.
It made me think, though, to see how hard Yahoo has tried to make the academics at the lab comfortable with their continuing roles as researchers. The head of the lab mentioned that he is currently on leave from UC Berkeley, where he is a professor; another talked about the goal of research being the advancement of knowledge, not competition with Google or anyone else. It felt somewhat as though the building had been set up as a campus adjunct with purple walls (Yahoo’s cube color of choice). The contrast to Google’s approach is noticable; at Google, researchers are hired as engineers and seemingly are thrown into the mix of the company head-first. As far as I know, Google Labs is a web site, not a building. While the Yahoo folks talked about the “knowledge transfer” between the Search and Research teams, I wonder if Google’s assimilation approach will produce better results in the long run — rather than creating a home for academics alongside the main body of the company, instead taking an academic ideal of world-wide access to information, and making that the goal of the corporation overall.
Interesting event. Also, it’s interesting to see Yahoo differentiating itself geographically. If you live in Berkeley or San Francisco, Yahoo has or will soon have a place for you to work with a short commute. The WebLogic team used to talk about their SF office as a weighty recruiting benefit, and Salesforce and others have followed. Seems like a smart move for Yahoo to be spreading out the area in which it can easily recruit.