I use to believe that the business model of Microsoft was just selling an overpriced Operating System and Microsoft Office to governments and businesses. I used to believe that the business model of Google was gathering data and selling accurate ads.
I was recently surprised to discover they have research subsidiaries called Microsoft Research and Google Deepmind
Microsoft Research employs more than 1,000 computer scientists, physicists, engineers, and mathematicians, including Turing Award winners, Fields Medal winners, MacArthur Fellows, and Dijkstra Prize winners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind
The founder of Deep Mind received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
Do they do actual research here or is this junk science?
Both have their names on RFCs and have developed many of the protocols we all use. To give them credit, the R&D backend side of things they are both pretty good at.
I’m not sure the research teams have anything to do with business models, or indeed research for what users actually want.