Okay, so there are issues with academia. How do those get solved?
They don't. As far as I can tell, all the problems, bar those that stem directly from funding, have always been there. That's the nature of the institution.
What changed, for CS at least, is that Google provides much of what is attractive to academia, but has all the funding that is required to make the other roadblocks go away. Google is not like Xerox PARC or MERL or Microsoft Research or other industry research labs. It's a company that's built upon being a research lab. I can believe the hey-days of Sun and SGI were probably similar.
The easiest way I describe working at Google to my grad friends is "It's a giant grad lab, except grads are also the ones running it, and they're billionaires." Academia can't compete with that, and it never did. The open question is not how to fix academia (as it never will be), but whether the Google model is sustainable. For as long as the Google model does exist, you will always see a net loss of professors to industry, rather than the other way around.
I dunno about the "never did" part. Google is doing some interesting stuff, but I don't think they're yet up to the peak of academia, like the amount of individual researcher freedom combined with innovation going on in the heyday of the MIT AI Lab. Even grad students were doing totally independent never-been-done research projects! Mere staff members like Richard Stallman had influential active side projects, too.
Google does seem like a great place if you're a senior enough researcher, though. People like Peter Norvig, Ken Thompson, and likely the author of this linked article, seem to get basically 100% freedom to work on whatever they want, with minimal management or job requirements, which is pretty much the ideal position to be in as a researcher. I suspect not all Google employees get Ken-Thompson-level freedom from having a boss, though.
Hehe, this is where is gets interesting. There's a huge number of small to mid sized companies which give you huge creative latitude for projects. Perhaps the most famous one is Valve (read their handbook, it's amazing!)
I'm actually hoping to replicate some of those ideas of both the good bits of academe plus the modalities in aforementioned handbook as I start to pull people into my org, Wellposed. (because what's more exciting than working with fun nice interesting intelligent folks who do amazing work plus being paid insanely well? )
It's an interesting model that I do hope catches on. My impression is that it's not currently widespread, but maybe I'm missing all the interesting action. Afaict, in the game industry (which I'm pretty familiar with, being an AI researcher in academia focusing on game design / game mechanics), the more common model is a very highly managed EA-style one. And among smaller firms, creative freedom in design is more common, but technical research isn't that common, because they don't have the resources/budget/interest. The only smallish game company I've seen produce actual published research is LittleTextPeople (some years ago, there was also Zoesis, but it's now defunct).
They don't. As far as I can tell, all the problems, bar those that stem directly from funding, have always been there. That's the nature of the institution.
What changed, for CS at least, is that Google provides much of what is attractive to academia, but has all the funding that is required to make the other roadblocks go away. Google is not like Xerox PARC or MERL or Microsoft Research or other industry research labs. It's a company that's built upon being a research lab. I can believe the hey-days of Sun and SGI were probably similar.
The easiest way I describe working at Google to my grad friends is "It's a giant grad lab, except grads are also the ones running it, and they're billionaires." Academia can't compete with that, and it never did. The open question is not how to fix academia (as it never will be), but whether the Google model is sustainable. For as long as the Google model does exist, you will always see a net loss of professors to industry, rather than the other way around.