Agree with all your points. The author has been in academia all his life so after 20 years or so, I can see how he can feel frustrated by it.
I think the general summary of what you're pointing out is that in industry it's easy to do things that the company wants to do (make money, make your boss look good, make life easier for the execs), and hard to do things that you want to do (cool stuff, disseminate ideas, and explore).
When you start at a company, you're optimistic and campaign to do a balance of both, but over time it wears you out so almost every defaults to doing the company work and fades out of public view. And yes, MSR is generally the exception but even then notice how many researchers there now do something related to "optimizing productivity".
> I think the general summary of what you're pointing out is that in industry it's easy to do things that the company wants to do (make money, make your boss look good, make life easier for the execs), and hard to do things that you want to do (cool stuff, disseminate ideas, and explore).
Based on my experience, I agree with the first half of this sentence but I'd argue with the second bit. Sometimes the interests align. The one thing that has made my PhD worthwhile has been that it gives me the credibility to work on cool stuff that's going to make the company money. That's not to say that I would necessarily be working on exactly the same things if I had been free to choose, but that's largely because I'm solving problems I didn't know existed before I took this job!
I think the general summary of what you're pointing out is that in industry it's easy to do things that the company wants to do (make money, make your boss look good, make life easier for the execs), and hard to do things that you want to do (cool stuff, disseminate ideas, and explore).
When you start at a company, you're optimistic and campaign to do a balance of both, but over time it wears you out so almost every defaults to doing the company work and fades out of public view. And yes, MSR is generally the exception but even then notice how many researchers there now do something related to "optimizing productivity".