But like everything Apple these days, they are just slow. Their Datacenter expansion already started late, and now with all the set back they are also much further behind. Similar to their Solar Energy which depends and linked to their DataCenter Expansion. And instead of spending money on their CDN ( Which they finally get around to doing so ), built their World Wide WiFi Network, ( iPhone users can enjoy free WiFi access like in Apple Store, but in far more places ), they decided to spend BILLIONS in making TV series and Drama.
They already are, in the cheapest, riskless way possible: those massive cash stashes are sustaining, or even boosting, their valuations.
When a company grows too big, it's in its best interest, as in investors best interest, not to spend a few billions on an initiative that could lead nowhere.
Consider SpaceX, its a growing business that took what, 10 billion in capital? That is below the 'material' threshold for some of these companies holding 100 to 300 billion dollars in cash equivalents.
Wouldn't that be too late? Or, put it this way: it is already a problem of capital. If you have enough, you can explore all technology tree branches till finding the one that leads you to it, even in parallel.
If there were a global carbon tax, it would give fusion an advantage against fossil fuels, but that would also be to the advantage of fission and renewables. In the absence of a global carbon tax, is fusion going to be cheap enough to displace fossil fueled power? We've had the technology for emissions-free electricity for decades, but it's difficult to profitably compete with fossil-based generators enjoying unpriced externalities.
But what about a commercial "DARPA" ?
I'm guessing that the innovations created by DARPA are a very good ROI in the value sense. If not, what is?
But like Xerox-Parc, the fear is that extracting money from that won't go well.
So one solution is creating a monopoly. But that's not ideal.
But what about some sort of insurance ? How would history look if Xerox-Parc was guarranteed to at-least break even?
From wikipedia: >Bell Laboratories was, and is, regarded by many as the premier research facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the operating system Unix, the programming languages C and C++, solar cells, the CCD, floating-gate MOSFET, and a whole host of optical, wireless and wired communications technologies and systems. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
Always the question of money and focus though. IBM has a huge research arm which is doing amazing things, but their impact on the bottom line is perhaps not as strong as Ginny (IBM CEO) would like? At Sun, when Sun Labs was a thing, there were jokes about "Where good ideas go to die." or something along those lines. Commercial interests have a really hard time seeing value in these things when they are done internally.
And for a company that's not a startup, Lockheed Martin has a fusion project.
The conversation came up because I was trying to fathom why a company would sit on billions of dollars when they could make more billions with it. This idea, that the future will have sudden insights that will take tremendous capital to exploit to create unassailable leadership positions, is not one I had considered. Fusion power, space opportunities, Etc, might be areas where things suddenly create an entirely new need.