In 1984 I visited NTT's 5th generation effort (and later worked at MCC, featured prominently in the article).
At the time I had a bitmapped display on my desk which I connected to a dedicated Lisp machine (Dorado). At the 5Gen office there was a row of desks with shared character terminals (one for every two developers) connected to the workhorse PDP-10 (same machine we used for research in the USA). The guy I was visiting was glad he only had to share the terminal with one other person. It was my first introduction to the blue collar status of programmers in Japan -- but without the respect that, say, a machinist gets in the US. It seemed pretty unlikely they'd have the opportunity to innovate.
The MCC response wasn't much better (perhaps the nearby Sematch did better? I don't know). It was also stupid and bureaucratic and although they did recruit a bunch of very smart folks from US and Mexican universities, I never saw much impact either (though I had two symbolics 3600s terminals on my desk). I don't think it's a government issue -- these multi-company collaborations (Taligent, Itanium, even Power) rarely come to much.
Of course companies can work together -- standards organizations and joint development projects are common. But IMHO a diffuse "consortium" really has no reason to exist beyond its own existence.
The tech is amazing, but this is a company owned by a consortium of big hotels (Marriot, Sheraton, etc) and they have no interest in feeding a disruptive startup that threatens their business. Rather, they simply want RoomKey to exist so they can use it as leverage in negotiations with Expedia and Orbitz and maybe Kayak. In other words, they want to be able to say "Give us a better percentage of revenue or we will fully fund RoomKey and you will be sorry."
This truth is obvious to the tech at programmer, and they find it immensely frustrating.
It's the mis-aligned incentives that lead to the poisonous politics of these multi-company joint efforts.
Perhaps I miss something for cultural reasons (I am not a US citizen nor do I live in the USA):
> The tech is amazing, but this is a company owned by a consortium of big hotels (Marriot, Sheraton, etc) and they have no interest in feeding a disruptive startup that threatens their business. Rather, they simply want RoomKey to exist so they can use it as leverage in negotiations with Expedia and Orbitz and maybe Kayak. In other words, they want to be able to say "Give us a better percentage of revenue or we will fully fund RoomKey and you will be sorry."
> This truth is obvious to the tech at programmer, and they find it immensely frustrating.
Why is this so frustrating to the programmers working there? They can work with interesting technology (e.g. Clojure). Yes, because of the incentives it will probably not become a really huge company, but again: where is the problem if they earn a good salary?
Because technology is the means, not the ends. Many of us work with tech not because we're fetishists for proximity or status of technology, but because we recognise that the technology is a means to actually do something meaningful in the world.
Have no meaning in the work that we do, and job-wise we'll be as happy working with tech as we were flipping burgers at McDonald's: pay and conditions aside obviously.
To create a website that serves as an important bollock against other travel websites that endanger the company that pays you is not what I would call meaningless.
Well, it would be competitive for Marriot or Sheraton to launch a new company to compete with Expedia or Orbitz. It is somewhat less competitive for them to buy a startup that is already doing that, but if they gave the startup a lot of money, so it could better compete with giants, then that would help increase competition. But to buy a startup only because you want some leverage against Expedia and Orbitz, and to let that startup die, is unfortunate in several ways. It wastes the efforts of a lot of good people, and it allows the total amount of competition in the system to decrease.
I wonder whether the MCC had ever a plan to move things they developed into 'production'. From the Lisp side this was things like Cyc, the UIMS they developed, the CAD system and the object database (Orion). The object database appeared later as a product.
I was just wondering: How does the 5th generation project compare to IBM Watson? (both are expert systems/rule based systems) Was it possible to pull off a system like that on 80ies minicomputers? I suspect that the PDP 10 too limited for the amount of data processing required. Maybe one could have done that with rule based systems on a mainframe of the day.
At the time I had a bitmapped display on my desk which I connected to a dedicated Lisp machine (Dorado). At the 5Gen office there was a row of desks with shared character terminals (one for every two developers) connected to the workhorse PDP-10 (same machine we used for research in the USA). The guy I was visiting was glad he only had to share the terminal with one other person. It was my first introduction to the blue collar status of programmers in Japan -- but without the respect that, say, a machinist gets in the US. It seemed pretty unlikely they'd have the opportunity to innovate.
The MCC response wasn't much better (perhaps the nearby Sematch did better? I don't know). It was also stupid and bureaucratic and although they did recruit a bunch of very smart folks from US and Mexican universities, I never saw much impact either (though I had two symbolics 3600s terminals on my desk). I don't think it's a government issue -- these multi-company collaborations (Taligent, Itanium, even Power) rarely come to much.
Of course companies can work together -- standards organizations and joint development projects are common. But IMHO a diffuse "consortium" really has no reason to exist beyond its own existence.