> Jobs was always thinking Apple could do better with the money in R&D
> Jobs wasn’t one to listen to anybody, so it did not matter.
It did matter. Jobs was wrong. Apple indeed couldn't do better. It's not even that Apple couldn't produce R&D results worth all this money. Apple couldn't even manage to spend at that pace. Steve Jobs' projects could and did use a lot of money but nowhere near that pace. And the pace of earnings got better still after Jobs.
Jobs was right on another aspect which was that this pile of money provided Apple solid, safe ground. Apple was safe from any risk of a few years of bad earnings. That was very costly safety.
It took a different CEO to finally work to reverse the damage. That project has taken many years and (arguably) isn't finished yet. And that's in parallel to massive increases in R&D.
It doesn't do a lot of basic science - I expect. But it does or funds a lot of engineering and applied science. that's the point of the article, that in the up-to-recently US system, corporations even with lots of earnings didn't have to.
> Jobs wasn’t one to listen to anybody, so it did not matter.
It did matter. Jobs was wrong. Apple indeed couldn't do better. It's not even that Apple couldn't produce R&D results worth all this money. Apple couldn't even manage to spend at that pace. Steve Jobs' projects could and did use a lot of money but nowhere near that pace. And the pace of earnings got better still after Jobs.
Jobs was right on another aspect which was that this pile of money provided Apple solid, safe ground. Apple was safe from any risk of a few years of bad earnings. That was very costly safety.
It took a different CEO to finally work to reverse the damage. That project has taken many years and (arguably) isn't finished yet. And that's in parallel to massive increases in R&D.
It doesn't do a lot of basic science - I expect. But it does or funds a lot of engineering and applied science. that's the point of the article, that in the up-to-recently US system, corporations even with lots of earnings didn't have to.