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The Internet Education Microsoft Businesses Google Sun Microsystems

Google, Microsoft, Sun to Fund New Internet Lab 127

Posted by Zonk from the it's-totally-rad dept.
brajesh writes "Yahoo! News has an AP story about Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems coming together to back a new Internet research laboratory aimed at helping entrepreneurs introduce more groundbreaking ideas to a mass audience. The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems or RAD lab is scheduled to open Thursday and will dole out $1.5 million annually over five years, with each company contributing equally. From the article : 'Conceivably, the lab's services could help launch another revolutionary company like online auctioneer eBay Inc. or even Google, which has emerged as one of the world's most valuable companies just seven years after its inception in a Silicon Valley garage.'"
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Google, Microsoft, Sun to Fund New Internet Lab More

Google, Microsoft, Sun to Fund New Internet Lab

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  • they will research quantum superposition... (Score:5, Funny)

    by free space ( 13714 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @10:14AM (#14264182)
    .... and the lab will be evil and not evil in the same time!

  • Cheaper than developing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Divide By Zero ( 70303 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @10:15AM (#14264190)
    Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems coming together to back a new Internet research laboratory aimed at helping entrepreneurs introduce more groundbreaking ideas to a mass audience ...so they can buy the rights to it, lock it down, and make it proprietary to their platform.

    It's the American Idol of developers. "We'll let you show off, decide who's best, sign them to a nasty license, and own your soul."

    (Kidding, but only half.)
    • It's the American Idol of developers. "We'll let you show off, decide who's best, sign them to a nasty license, and own your soul."

      No, it's Superstar USA. They tell you they're looking for the best programmer and giving him a job at Google, but really they're looking for the worst and he has to do hardware for Microsoft AND software for Sun.

  • I don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IAAP ( 937607 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @10:15AM (#14264192)
    Sun Microsystems Inc. also is joining the $7.5 million project at the University of California, Berkeley. The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems, or RAD, lab was scheduled to open Thursday and will dole out $1.5 million annually over five years, with each company contributing equally.

    That's chump change to Microsoft and Google (I don't know about SUN). Why aren't any one of them just funding the whole lab themselves? It's great that Berkely is getting some needed funding, but I think that this may some sort of PR thing. Just my 5 cents.

    • > Just my 5 cents.

      Annually? Over five years in equal payments?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @11:00AM (#14264602)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • When you consider how many silicon valley start ups started and how little financing they had in the begining you could start up a dozen or so startups and maybe one or two of them might start out to be blockbusters.
      • I've worked in a research lab. In fact, that lab got funding from Google and also from Microsoft. The project to be worked on was designing and building cheap and easy-to-assemble robot kits that can be used in a classroom setting to teach both computer science and robotics in a fun and hands-on manner. The $400,000 from Google and Microsoft would have funded the lab (which has a staff of eight or nine people) for a year. This $400,000, combined with a few smaller grants, were enough to hire a designer
      • 1.5 million would hire about 3 top flight researchers and all the facilities they need to do research. The amount is so small it is almost a joke.

        So how many resources would you, oh sultan of all research, throw into experiment with new stuff? Three well equipped and capable researchers sounds about right to start off with. If any good stuff starts coming out it, I'm sure that will increase. Bram Cohen was one man of almost no resources and yet look what he did...
      • 1.5 million would hire about 3 top flight researchers

        Or about 1.8 million graduate students to do the work for you.

    • That's chump change to Microsoft and Google (I don't know about SUN).

      I'm too lazy to google anything, but I do remember reading on slashdot about 2 weeks ago that Sun's CEO makes more than Bill....

      just what I remember, as it was talking about Mr. Gates finally making >1mil in a year.

  • "Conceivably, the lab's services could help..." (Score:5, Interesting)

    by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @10:15AM (#14264197)
    Conceivably, the lab's services could help launch another revolutionary company...

    Most "revolutionary" companies have been launched by going against "common wisdom" and doing thigs different ways than everyone else. Thus getting "help" early on from big companies.. well.. you draw the conclusions..

    • You're right, and that being said, there's erally nothing revolutionary about either eBay or Google. They didn't do anything unique, they just did it better than their competitors. Of course, anybody with any kind of business background would know that most highly successful businesses aren't necessarily revolutionary, but instead they're often a one-off company. There was lots and lots and lots of search before Google. Google did it better. eBay was definitely not the first auction site. Hell, they'r

  • Purpose? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Conceivably, the lab's services could help launch another revolutionary company like online auctioneer eBay Inc. or even Google...

    Err no? Surely the whole point of Microsoft, Sun, Google etc, forming this lab, is to STOP such an independent company from forming?

  • Did I just read that right? (Score:3, Funny)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @10:17AM (#14264212) Journal
    Sun, Google and Microsoft... in bed?

    Hahhaha, next thing apple with bring out intel based macs... oh you editors you really get me going. hahah.

    Imagine how many chair throwing tantrums there will be...

    please type the word in this image: aperture
    random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org

  • and the first product is (Score:5, Funny)

    by free space ( 13714 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @10:18AM (#14264221)
    a desktop search tool that runs on all platforms, but crashes every 5 minutes.
    * ducks *

  • Bargain (Score:5, Insightful)

    by __aahlyu4518 ( 74832 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @10:19AM (#14264225)
    So for $2.500.000 each they will get access to the brightest ideas concerning the internet in the next 5 years... Is it just me or is that the bargain of the century?
  • The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems or RAD lab

    I propose to gather the world's greatest minds to generate memorable, unpatented acronyms for the IT industry.

    I'm sure the person hours lost to coming up with yet another acronym for yet another venture must run into the gazillions of dollars per year. Charges for my companies services will be slight by comparison.

    So where's my 1.5 mill?

  • Egad! An Axis of Evil!

    • Very smart from Microsoft: keep the competition close, prepare for the next backstab. I'm not sure what the other two gain as a benefit from the deal, though.

  • FTFA (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ZiakII ( 829432 )
    "We realize if research isn't being done in university laboratories," he said, "then the pipeline of ideas and computer science graduates coming into our companies eventually is going to dry up."

    I hate to say it but I somewhat disagree, now that web hosting has gotten so cheap most can be done in there home/dorm, most just need the drive and the idea of what they want to do.
    • Not really.

      I have an idea I am working on, but it requires a cluster of machines, and a lot of bandwidth. Also, It would need about 25million to complete. However, If I could get 1.5 million to start, I could get enough done to go to other sources for funding in 2 years.

      There are a lot of people like me with these ideas, but they are having a tough time getting past the first round of money.

    • I hate to be the one to belabor the obvious, but considerable amount of research is no longer being done at the universities because the American corporations have offshored it to foreign universities.

      'Nuff said....

  • $1.5 million? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @10:22AM (#14264257) Journal
    It cost over a trillion dollars to create the Internet.

    $1.5 million sounds like a honeypot, not a venture-capital firm...

    They're sucking in neophytes who will sign over IP rights and get very little in return.

  • oh, errr.. nevermind. that's 1.5 million. woopty.
  • Google, Sun, and Microsoft... hmmmm GSM... next thing you know, T-Mobile will be involved

    poffttt!! Why are people looking for conspiracies? This is cheap at twice the price. Getting all those ideas pushed to them for the little money they spend on the lab? Yes, this is not unlike the police setting up a training school for thiefs so they can catch the graduates...

    2 cents used

  • MS? Sun? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 )
    Sorry, I'm not seeing it. As near as I can tell, this is a "cheap" way to kill threats in the cradle and steal new ideas.

    Call me cynical, but look at the history of these companies before you do it.
    • I think on the other hand that it serves a dual purpose: it allows large companies to step outside of the "not invented here" syndrome and really scrutinize ideas that may be suppressed in their own corporate cultures, and, for the person who has the idea the pay is acceptable - take a million dollars guaranteed without taking all the risk in actually bringing the product to market and hoping it pans out. Overall I agree that the large companies have little to lose but I don't neccessarily agree that the
    • while this might be true in some cases.. there are also other things to consider here... how many times has a Professor taken all the credit for the stuff his grad student has some. how many times do grad and undergrad students come up with really cool concepts, or prototypes of products but never get a chance to pursue them outside of the school? in this case.. everyone wins.... the students get paid for coming up with some cool stuff and a bunch of ppl get to use it. Its no different than a PHB that s
  • Pun of the day:

    Will only systems developed with RAD [wikipedia.org] tools be eligible?


    Damien

  • Nothing to see here (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mrm677 ( 456727 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @10:34AM (#14264346)
    Move along. This is a Berkeley research lab funded by various sources. There are plenty of labs with similar funding. My academic research lab is funded by IBM, Sun, and Intel. Whoopee! Absolutely does not mean there is any kind of alliance.

    • This is a Berkeley research lab funded by various sources. There are plenty of labs with similar funding. My academic research lab is funded by IBM, Sun, and Intel. Whoopee! Absolutely does not mean there is any kind of alliance.

      Absolutely right. I've been to and presented at several of the RAD retreats. This is just the successor to the ROC (Recovery-Oriented Computing) intiative, which is now being retired.

      The Berkeley systems groups have some great industry support. This does not mean 'selling out'--t
  • all we need now are four horsemen, and a Babylonian whore, and we've got us the Apocalypse!
    • Google, Microsoft, and Sun teaming up... all we need now are four horsemen, and a Babylonian whore, and we've got us the Apocalypse!

      Well, you have three of the horsemen already. Sun is Famine, MS is Pestilence and Google is... um... either Death or War, I guess um...

      OK, so the funny analogy fell apart. And wasn't funny. Sue me.

      Can we have get extra Babylonian whores with that?

  • whether to expect nothing from it as being merely a PR stunt, or be very afraid...
  • But just you wait and see all the innovative and original products!

    Sun Search
    Sun Maps
    Sun Earth
    Sun Blogger
    Sun Froogle
    Sun Groups

    And so on...

    • correction: Sun JAVA Search(tm) Sun JAVA maps(tm) Sun JAVA Earth (tm), etc. The fact that these might have little or no JAVA in them, and little or no Sun design input is of course of no importance...
  • This is no different than when Sun announced working with ATT on a single unix standard. I wonder what fruits will come from this.

  • garage? (Score:1, Informative)

    by muhgcee ( 188154 ) *
    Silicon valley garage? I know the image of a tech company starting in a Silicon Valley garage may be somewhat romantic, but didn't Google start in a Stanford lab?
    • "Silicon valley garage? I know the image of a tech company starting in a Silicon Valley garage may be somewhat romantic, but didn't Google start in a Stanford lab?"

      Good observation. Not sure of the history, but my recollection is the same.

      It is much like the term you will often see in newspapers describing some drug bust. It often is a "pre-dawn raid", even if the raid was actually at 3pm on a sunny August afternoon. Reporters just seem to like the imagery a "pre-dawn raid" invokes.

      Watch for it now, you

    • "In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation's staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub."

      http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html [google.com]

      mahlen

    • The technology started at Stanford, where they were PHD students, but the Company, I.E. the commercial entity, started in a Garage.

      So, like the earlier discussion about Schrodinger's Cat, you are at the same time both correct and incorrect.
  • I can understand MS + Sun but adding google into the mix? WTF?

    Oh well, the IT industry never made sense, why should it start now.

    On the other hand, idiotic alliances to fund startups. Hmmm do I smell a bubble?

  • Once Crawfish, Swan and Pike
    Set out to pull a loaded cart,
    And all together settled in the traces;
    They pulled with all their might,
    but still the cart refused to budge!
    The load it seemed was not too much for them:
    Yet Crawfish scrambled backwards,
    Swan strained up skywards,
    Pike pulled toward the sea.
    Who's guilty here and who is right is
    not for us to say-
    But anyway the cart's still there today.
  • so the lab's servers will run with Microsoft IIS on a Linux box and none of the services / software / innovations will be made available for the Linux community.
  • Google: set up a creative environment to help developping new ideas
    Microsoft: copy those ideas and implement them in their upcomming OS
    Sun: rewrite them in Java and release them as Open Source ten years later

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by certel ( 849946 )
    All I can say is WOW. I would have never guessed that MS and Google would be teaming up to complete ANY task.
    • This way they can see what products Google is developing without waiting to see the finished Beta like everyone else.
  • ... But I can't afford a house with a garage.

  • Oh what a load of bollocks!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by coralsaw ( 904732 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @11:12AM (#14264725)
    I've heard this before, when VISA and MASTERCARD got together to create the one and only mobile payment system, with very limited funding. Which didn't go anywhere because it was underfunded and thus non-committed to by its founder members.

    These people, Google MS and Sun, won't even spit on the ground for $1.5 mil, let alone create a business plan... If they really intended to go beyond window dressing, they should have put their money where their mouth is and pour some real money into it.

    It's an intended failure from the word go. /coralsaw

  • Probably wasteful (Score:2, Insightful)

    by radiumhahn ( 631215 )
    Throwing money at inventors to make them innovate faster is similar to throwing money at monkeys to make them evolve faster. The process of invention is very organic... inventions, products, and business ideas respond well to having money thrown at them...usually, but actual discovery does best with long term support and development... not rapid cash with little supervision.
  • I mean, this whole article reads as a joke?

    Yahoo reports their competitor Google is entering into a partnership with Microsoft and Sun (two companies that have been feuding for the last decade). Microsoft cooperating with Google (or any company that isn't paying them licensing cheques)?

    I'd check the credentials on this one.

  • Read the papers ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by TallMatthew ( 919136 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @11:26AM (#14264844)
    Did anybody bother to read the RAD website? Look at the papers that have been generated ...

    • A Flexible Architecture for Statistical Learning and Data Mining from System Log Streams
    • Combining Visualization and Statistical Analysis to Improve Operator Confidence and Efficiency for Failure Detection and Localization
    • Control Considerations for Scaling Event Processing
    • Predictive control for dynamic resource allocation in enterprise data centers

    Looks like they're trying to come up some fancy-schmancy approach to network management, emergency handling and risk control. It would make sense all three of these orgs would be interested in refining techniques along those lines, but pardon me while I yawn.

  • Ok, so why doesn't this group spend $1.5 million giving computers to kids who can't afford them? After all, for $1k or less, a kid could have a maxed-out Linux box and learn C++, Java, etc. Isn't there a shortage of software-related talent now? Why are these companies blowing their money on a research lab when they could be capturing the next generation? (BTW, is any of this $7+mil actual cash money, or is it just full-market-price proprietary software donations?)
  • Perhaps I'm mistaken, but for some reason I thought each of these companies (well, perhaps not Sun) has a division that already does what RAD does, but with much better funding.
  • Okay, am I the *only* one who had a massive (and somewhat painful) flashback to the 1980s when I saw "RAD"? All that I could think of while reading the summary was the bad lingo of the time.

    This new RAD thing is, like, you know, totally gnarly! It's just, like, a rad RAD! But it's got, like, Microsoft? Oh, totally gag me with a spoon! At least having Sun and Google, like, makes me, you know, feel kinda warm and cozy -- like when I've got my leg warmers on, right? Like, that is so-o-o weird, you kno

  • The issue here is that what ends up becoming a phenomenon (like Google or E-bay), often start out as mere curiosities. I'm not sure that either of them set out at the very beginning to make something that would become wildly popular. What's more, I'm not sure you can buy this- it just sort of happens. It is my opinion that more often than not, the depth of one's pockets is irrelevent.

  • strange bedfellows? evil ahead? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tlord ( 703093 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @12:21PM (#14265336)
    Several commentors are worried that funding from these sources implies inevitable corruption of the effort into a proprietary product owned by The Big Guys. One poster sees a contradiction there and wonders why, at this funding level, one company didn't just fund the whole thing (rather than Google joining Microsoft et al.)

    Don't panic. There seem to be a few things going on here:

    1) The principle investigators for this project are basically intellectual "hubs". Stunning track records. Long histories of students who go on to "move and shake". Perhaps most importantly: active involvement with people from all over the industry. If you want a group that simultaneously has its fingers on the pulses of both industry and academia and has a far better grasp of both fundamentals and how to systematically move forward in good directions, you could do a whole lot worse. The point: this is, to a degree, a "write your own ticket" group of researchers and they wisely elect to go for independence and diverse funding sources. The Big Companies may be big but this crowd is a bit more immune than most to being bullied. Everyone involved knows and embraces that.

    2) At the levels of management where funding decisions like this are initiated and made, people are not so out of touch as the average slashdotter is likely to think. Oh sure, they have blind spots. But they are not stupid. They've seen Internet service industry growth increasingly coming from garage projects -- almost to the point that that's the only place it comes from. They do what they can to systemize and potentiate entrepreneurial skunksworking internally but they also know the social and economic limitations of management. Importantly (as can be seen by acquisitions, for example), they know that they need to rely on many, many other people making the up-front R&D investments, most failing, and a few becoming targets for acquisition. One aspect of RAD is that it envisions radically lowering the costs of playing for those external high-risk investors. If today, there are 100 people trying to win the social-network/calendering war, and perhaps 1000 serious novel-network-service efforts overall, and each of these efforts costs many people-months just to get out of "coming soon" state --- an aim of this project is to bump those numbers of people by an order of magnitude or more and shrink the lead-time similarly.

    3) This is how corporate investment in academic research is supposed to work (and so it's sad, really, that RAD materials describe this as a "new" model). Corporate investors specifically don't get exclusives and therefore don't invest all that much, individually. What do they get? Partly they get new ideas which, while open to all, the investors hope to be in the best position to use (or the best position to benefit from others using them). Partly (and complementing that) they get less tangible benefits like personal access to PIs and, generally, a leg up on "technology transfer [out of the lab and into the market]".

    4) This funding model is an application of a Nash Equilibrium. Let's take Microsoft. They've no shortage of systems researchers that, polite rivalries aside, could be sequestered in a room and could do all of this work just fine -- at far greater expense to Microsoft. What happens if they do that? Google eventually figures out the gist of what problems they're solving and how and obtains the same results, given those hints, far cheaper (and good look trying to repair that with patents -- it just don't work that way). In general, at the bleeding edge like this, the most probable outcome for any of these companies is that they hurt themselves unless they choose a strategy that gives their competitors options other than a direct assault -- RAD is an example of such a winning strategy.

    5) "There's something happening here." [Buffalo Springfield]. RAD materials don't talk about it directly and, indeed, they're taking a step-towards rather than looking

  • which has emerged as one of the world's most valuable companies

    Is Google valuable? Certainly it's valued, as evidenced by its stock price. But when I think of "valuable", I think of its real value, e.g. what one could get by selling off the tangible assets.

    This seemed like more of a point before I started typing, now not so much. Oh well, hate to waste the effort so I'm posting anyway.

  • Of course Google and Microsoft are working together. When you've got a famous name like Michael Jordan [berkeley.edu] on the roster, who wouldn't be enthusiastic!

    Maybe I should change my name before I write a grant proposal...

  • It's like The Good, The Bad, & the Ugly.
  • This sounds just like the Invention Submission Corporation [inventnet.com]... ... or any other scam that wants to "pay you [a microfraction] for your great idea [that they will make _X_illions from]".

    Don't buy it. If you have a great idea, persue it through the normal channels - hard work and complete confidence and persistence in your idea/IP.

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