The abandonment of  basic scientific research by industry is probably another example of  C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures" wending its way into the industrial complex. In 1959, Snow described the incompatibility of the culture of  the scientific/technical community with that of the non-technical establishment. In the contact I have had with several corporations that enjoyed highly respectable
scientific research establishments as a technical executive, consultant and plodding researcher, I have observed how the technical and business communities were constantly at odds in their goals and the means to achieve them. The Ford Motor Company in the 1950's and 60's supported a fine scientific research laboratory populated by scientists and engineers who achieved international prestige in their scientific accomplishments while at the same time assessing how their scientific productivity can contribute to the future strategies of an automobile company. They participated in task forces assessing the future of the transportation economy and the relationship of the companies' products including the materials that it employed. But the proposals that came from this assemblage fell on the deaf ears of the business executives who ignored  such proposals as hybrid vehicles and fuel cells for motive power way back in the early sixties.  Far more glaring, as noted in the article, was the unwillingness of  corporate management at Xerox to turn the remarkable output of Xerox PARC into company-sponsored products. Fully five years before the appearance of the first personal computer, corporate management was presented with a computer
capable of word processing as we know it today and spread sheets. A thousand beta versions of this product were deployed throughout the company and with such key potential customers as the U.S. Congress and the White House. But those in the company responsible for manufacturing and marketing the product offered all kinds of excuses to side-step innovative products that the
strategists maintained would become the future of the company. The founders of billion dollar companies such  as ADOBE and 3-COM were PARC scientists who left Xerox in disgust when Xerox refused to productize their inventions. The excuses they offered for shunning these inventions were lame. One division executive, an accountant by profession, who would have been responsible for one of these products  offered the explanation that the products would be too expensive. When confronted with the argument that costs of electronics were following Moore's law rigorously, he refused to acknowledge the validity of  Moore's law – the guiding principle of the entire electronics industry. Indeed, C. P. Snow was correct. The technologists and the business executives speak different languages.

Jacob E. Goldman