Comment by cmrdporcupine

In the end the amazing research work done at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC and (to some degree) IBM Research didn't benefit their benefactors so much as they benefited the industry and arguably the world as a whole.

Which is a specific weakness of the model of capitalism we have moved into in the west during my lifetime -- the gradual defunding or deprecation of state sponsored planning and research means there's little room for improvements that travel across the walls of corporate ownership.

Instead this work is being done on the whole voluntarily in the open source domain, and is likely undercompensated.

Where companies cooperate on cross-company technical standards committees, it's often very painful and the results often dubious.