> “Our practices tend to reinforce a natural selection bias — those who are interested in working as a team to deliver a great product versus those whose primary motivation is publishing,” says Federighi.
And I think they may be right. Researchers often aren't the best product creators.
You NEED researchers to build a robust autonomous vehicle or speech recognition system. Hell, you know how many electrical and materials scientists they have working on the iPhone?
Physical products actually requires science and research. Designing a responsive landing page does not.
Edison and Ford vs Einstein and Faraday.
This is a blatantly false dichotomy: there's nothing about publishing that precludes anyone from "working as a team to deliver a great product"
> Researchers often aren't the best product creators.
Tell that to Andrew Ng!
He's made enormous contributions to human knowledge, but doesn't seem to be interested in the hard work of bringing a product to market.
He even left Coursera to return to theory.
what exactly do you define as "the hard work of bringing a product to market"? To me, his work at Google certainly applies as bringing a product to market - the cat recognition deeplearning AI is a product.
That led to an interesting paper and a lot of potential applications.
By "the hard work of bringing a product to market", I meant the process of perfecting the product for actual applications.
> By "the hard work of bringing a product to market", I meant the process of perfecting the product for actual applications
I'll have to disagree - "perfecting the product" is one of many roles required to bring a product to market. Other roles that are just as important are "dreamer/visionary", "practical starter/founder", "scale-up person". Sometimes one person can assume multiple roles, but rarely all roles, all of them are hard work.
Yes - those in the field who prefer to publish will not be willing to join Apple. How much of an opportunity cost this is to Apple remains an open question.