The End of Industrial Research Labs?

This piece in the New York Times details the changing nature of academia-industry partnerships, a big theme in the "Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge" event I attended in mid-November. I was an intern at Bell Labs and must say the environment there was remarkably close to a university. It is interesting to watch research change inside of corporations -- for example, Yahoo! and Google take dramatically different approaches to research. The former is much more academic, while the latter seems to believe it is better to "do first, prove later."