> CS is a little bit of an exception because the capital cost of basic research isn’t, proportionally, as high, and because the promise-to-product path is often short enough that having done the basic work in house can be a meaningful advantage in getting to market first (though, see Google on much of modern AI for a counterexample)

...And because they have monopoly money. Basically, research labs are usually vanity spending for corporations with too much money. Xerox parc was funded by a monopoly. Bell labs was funded by a monopoly. Google funds its moonshots with its monopoly.

Bell and Xerox became powerful because they invented game-changing technologies. They were fundamentally research-based organizations from the start.