Dr. Rose responds in his blog: http://dwave.wordpress.com/2007/02/01/a-great-question/
I don't fully agree with the response but still a excellent read :) If hypothesis #2, that Dr. Rose proposes, is true, it means that the R&D Group and New Product Initiative Group of a company are directed by the sales and marketing teams since they are usually in close contact with the customer and know what the customer wants. (long sentence, watch for idea wraps) I am sure that IBM spends a large amount of its resources on what the customer really wants, but I think IBM has spend a lot time and money on inventions that were not driven by customer demands. Some of them succeeded, while others failed. Those that succeeded have been "integrated" and commoditized (yes including cheap knockoffs) so much that now it is hard to see that these innovations were NOT driven by customer demands. IBM's work on RISC, Speech Recognition and Fractals comes to mind. _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde
