Comment Re:Is that really their job? (Score 1) 99
The point of government research is to learn something new, whether it works or not.
FTFY. Commercial research, as you pointed out further down, includes product development. (Of course, it also includes developing things that help you develop the products as well.) Xerox PARC was/is funded by the sale of copy machines. It isn't unreasonable to require researchers to focus on developing products that help fund more research.
You shouldn't expect Xerox to fund projects that are solely designed to learn something new. Sometimes they will and that is great, but at the end of the day, the responsibility for funding high-risk research (the research that commercial labs often build upon) rests solely on the government.