The issue is that when doing a sabbatical/internship at a company, it's often not possible to write a paper - either because there's not time, or the company may not want to publish the work (which could be confidential). I wouldn't go to a company expecting to be able to publish about the project.
Confidentiality is overrated, outside of narrow areas of core tech. A few years ago, Facebook hired a massive fleet of Google experts, and replicated a lot of the tech and open sourced it. But the reason they cause Google competitive trouble is because Google didn't understand the social product and have a culture to build it, not trade secret tech problems.
But if a company wanted to make sabbaticals or science-focused internships more interesting for people on the academic career tracks, it probably could ease their confidential policies and design such internships so that said academics can publish, right?
You have mentioned elsewhere that you are looking into how Google can help the academic world focus more on the right industrial questions, and you personally recommend such sabbaticals/internships -- so this seems like a natural step.
It's a good idea but fairly challenging in practice. The amount of information you need to reveal in a scientific publication may make many companies uncomfortable. My view is that academics should not just be focused on getting another paper on their CV -- there is value in having the industry experience even if no papers come out of it.
I'm not in academia per se, but (in Germany) just getting to do my (equivalent of a) Master's thesis at a company (still with a supervisor at university) was hard enough - because sometimes they just seem to search for people to do work based on their topic suggestions and if you want to do something that's a little off the tracks... Let's just say there were no real arguments, mostly just "we don't like companies that are not university spin-offs and oh shock that company might reuse that thesis to advertise their exploits instead of granting the kudos to the university.
But maybe that's not the general case, but as someone coming from the tech sector to get a degree (and not the other way round) this sounds all too similar :)
