Good points. I agree with the point about luxury: some definitely have way more lee-way than others. Your company's method is one of the good methods I referred to. Another is Jane St's where they apparently dedicated time and labor to building better Ocaml tools (incl standard library). Almost every Global 2000 company can afford to do 100x that. Some, to their credit, are contributing things to IT community. Most just don't and even reinforce problems with their decisions.
So, there's certainly a huge gap between most companies and Facebook. Yet, even allocating one person, day, 15% time, etc. to try or build some new things might have quite some results over thousands to hundreds of thousands of companies. I'm just arguing companies could be putting in significantly more effort even without a true R&D department or luxurious business model. Past that, mileage varies from company to company esp with their circumstances.
So, there's certainly a huge gap between most companies and Facebook. Yet, even allocating one person, day, 15% time, etc. to try or build some new things might have quite some results over thousands to hundreds of thousands of companies. I'm just arguing companies could be putting in significantly more effort even without a true R&D department or luxurious business model. Past that, mileage varies from company to company esp with their circumstances.