I was a highly paid contractor at a well known Silicon Valley computer company.
They brought me in to specifically create a new high-performance SSD (solid state disk) infrastructure. I had a small team of developers and minimal hardware access to complete my invention.
A few months after we started my project, the company was acquired by a very large high tech company. My project continued. After another 4 months, we had a demonstration ready... it met or exceeded all of the goals set forth when I started. We needed another 4 to 6 months to make it into a product that could be sold, but some selected sales opportunities were identified and, under non-disclosure, we told prospective customers about the existence of this technology.
Last June, one of those customers went to the HQ of the large company that I now worked for and presented to them (us) an opportunity to sell to that customer some $70 M of hardware and software, including a significant amount of my new storage invention.
At the end of the meeting, the VP of my division tried to convince the customer to wait to purchase their system until 2019 or 2020 because "new technology under development at XXX" would supplant the system I invented. The new technology requires the cooperation of processor chip vendors (Intel, AMD) and, so far, none have signed up to include this unproven technology.
The next week my contract and those of my team members were unceremoniously terminated and my WORKING TECHNOLOGY was thrown away.
The customer went away angry that they couldn't get the promised system to solve their needs.
The irony of this is... IF I had invented this outside of the large company (in my own startup) AND gotten it to the point of selling it to a few customers... the large tech company would have almost certainly paid over $100M to acquire my company as this is the way that they "innovate". In their case NIH is much better than inventing it internally.
American corporations are so insane that you can't believe it.
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