|
|
|||||
Yahoo! Research Berkeley LaunchesI 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.
|
|||||
© 2012, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (707) 827-7019(800) 889-8969 All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. |
|||||
Comments: 4
Jeremy Zawodny [11 October 2005 07:37 PM]
I guess I missed you there today. Too bad...
gnat [12 October 2005 09:48 AM]
I'm really interested in how assimilation vs adjacency will work. Both systems can produce good results when there's little pressure on. What happens when the boom is over, when the growth of Internet advertising stops? Will Google become a less-fun place to work? Will the researchers flee back to academia? Will Yahoo! integrate research into the product part of the company (as happened at a lot of R&D labs in the bust)? I guess the test is how well the systems produce in the good times, and how little they have to be changed for the hard times.
Anonymous [12 October 2005 11:20 AM]
I wonder if Google's assimilation approach will produce better results in the long run
I actually think the Yahoo! approach would be better. Research and Engineering are often two distinct roles. Sure, engineers do some research when designing a system, however, they usually have a deadline which causes them to be much more short sighted (by necessity) than the researcher who is taking more of a 'blue-sky' approach with no deadlines looming on the horizon.
Kudos to Yahoo! - the idea of having a pure research branch is dwindling in this day and age. The transistor, internet, and a lot of other stuff we take for granted today came out of research labs which did not have a mandate to produce immediately-profitable products. I'm afraid that this decline in research is going to lead to a dearth of new products/ideas in coming decades especially now that the government is not funding much pure research anymore.
BTW: What about the recenly announced deal between Google and NASA? Isn't that supposed to contain a pure research component?
Marc Hedlund [12 October 2005 11:41 AM]
An excellent test, Nat. I wonder that about Google a whole lot. A shift in their market could very dramatically change the company, especially since they make the vast majority of their money from what I would consider to be one product.
Good points, too, 'anonymous', especially about Google/NASA. I don't agree on deadline pressure necessarily -- the company can choose how it wants to motivate and schedule its engineers, whether there are distinct research and product groups or not. I agree, though, that there is something different about research labs which could well be lost if most or all CS research went on in companies rather than in separate labs.