What I write about here tends to be technology and business, two very different enterprises that tend to feed each other. Business provides the money to develop new technologies that lead to more business, or at least that's the idea. I'm worried, though, that this traditional relationship is becoming skewed. I'm worried that we are doing too much business and not enough technology.

On the technology side, there is basic research and then research and development. The purpose of research and development is to invent a product for sale. Edison invented the first commercially successful light bulb, but he did not invent the underlying science that made that light bulb possible. Basic research is something else - ostensibly, the search for knowledge for its own sake. Basic research provides the scientific knowledge upon which R&D is later built. If a product ever results from basic research, it usually does so 10 to 15 years down the road, following a later period of research and development.

The companies that can afford to do basic research (and can't afford not to) are ones that dominate their markets. They have both the greatest resources to spare for this type of activity and the most to lose if, by choosing not to do basic research, they eventually lose their technical advantage over competitors. It's cheap insurance, since failing to do basic research guarantees that the next major advance will be owned by someone else.

Since their true product is insurance, not knowledge, basic researchers in industry often find their work is at the mercy of the marketplace and their captains-of-industry bosses. In the business world, just because something CAN be built does not at all guarantee that it WILL be built, which explains why RCA first invented and then dropped the liquid crystal display. RCA made this mid-1960s decision because LCDs might have threatened its then-profitable business of building cathode ray picture tubes. Forty years later, of course, RCA exists only as a brand name licensed from GE by Thomson, the French electronics giant, and LCD displays — nearly all made in Asia — are everywhere.

This explains why researchers at Xerox Corp. invented in the 1970s lots of computer technology Xerox never used. Computer workstations, networks, and graphical user interfaces were all invented by Xerox just in case the world traded paper for computer screens. And since the world is still hooked on paper, the only result of this research that Xerox bothered to exploit was the laser printer — the only part that actually involved paper.

So we have idealized basic research (knowledge for the sake of knowledge) and real basic research (knowledge to maintain market dominance). But this only describes industrial basic research. Lots of basic research is also done at universities, where the real motivation is often to get tenure and/or brownie points for bringing-in research grants. And a fair amount of basic research is done at national laboratories and NASA.

If you are reading this outside the United States, I am sure there are equivalent organizations in your country. Please don't feel slighted because I am referring to outfits I know much better.

Now here is my complaint: Basic research is dying. I spent a day recently at IBM Research after it had experienced its first-ever layoffs. IBM, even IBM, can't afford to continue doing basic research at historic levels. If IBM is worrisome, Bell Labs — birthplace of the transistor, the communications satellite, lasers, and so many other things that can zap you — Bell Labs is a train wreck. Supported now by the decrepit Lucent Technologies instead of the equally decrepit AT&T, Bell Labs is a shadow of what it once was.

What about the universities? They, too, have learned a new game, and that game is patent exploitation. Led by the University of California, MIT and the University of Texas, these schools are building patent portfolios using the exact same rules followed by giant Japanese corporations. They are secretive and withhold information not only from the rest of the world, but even from their own organizations. Patent licensing is such a big deal and university patent attorneys are so clueless about the real purpose of research, that progress is being slowed, and in some cases, stopped altogether for a few years just to let the paperwork catch up.

So what we have is less and less basic research. In time, this will lead to less research and development, and ultimately to fewer and poorer products. We're eating our seed corn. It may not show for a few more years, but the result of this behavior will eventually be a shift in global scientific power.

This is not a good thing.

Now, while you are digesting that, I'd like to ask a favor. I'd like to next week take a look at where high-tech business is going in the next year and I'd like your help to do so. What is hot? What is not? I'm looking for good news and bad, and I am counting on you to give it to me so I can give it, in turn, to everyone else.

Is your company doing especially well? Are there sectors that are especially exciting, where products are bubbling to the surface and companies feel like they are about to show the world just how good they are? Tell me about it.

Or does your company or a company you know have about it the smell of death? Tell me about that, too.

It is relatively easy to predict the future five years from now, but much harder to look only 12 months ahead, but that's what I want to do.

Take wireless networking for example. The mobile phone companies are hurting and will continue to do so for another couple of years. Too much building too fast is the problem, too much debt, and no 3G customers to go with those half built 3G networks. WiFi (802.11a, b, and g) is coming on strong, though, and I think the new rage will be mesh networks where every node is also a router and a repeater. But we'll shortly see fallout even among the mesh companies with Nokia reworking its Rooftop product, MeshLAN faltering a bit, MobileMesh playing an uncertain role as the Open Source offering and a new player, SkyPilot, entering the business.

SkyPilot, run by one of the founders of Covad, is following the Covad model of bringing broadband services to incumbent ISPs, though this time the broadband is wireless. And it is high-speed, too, with most of the original mesh guys from SRI International now doing mac-level protocols for 802.11a backbones. SkyPilot is going to be a very big deal a year from now.