I work in the R&D division of a microprocessor company. Most of what we do, I would call "research", but not quite "science". We investigate things that are too risky or time-consuming for our product design groups to look into, with an eye towards making our company money in the future. We fund Ph.D. students in electrical engineering and computer science at university labs, and collaborate with them. But we don't (generally) push back the frontiers of human knowledge in our day-to-day work.
Things might be different at (say) IBM Research Zürich, doing work on atomic force microscopy, but that sort of thing seems to be the exception rather than the rule in industrial R&D. I don't know if I would have expected to see hardcore science at Sun Labs where the article writer's friend worked.
I like this as a definition of research in a corporate environment: "We investigate things that are too risky or time-consuming for our product design groups to look into, with an eye towards making our company money in the future."
Things might be different at (say) IBM Research Zürich, doing work on atomic force microscopy, but that sort of thing seems to be the exception rather than the rule in industrial R&D. I don't know if I would have expected to see hardcore science at Sun Labs where the article writer's friend worked.