Where three roads meet!!

Its been 5 years 11 days, since I first came to IIIT Hyderabad, and now I'm almost done with my journey here, and a new journey awaits for me, although what it is, I have got no clue. I'm interested in pursuing Research via enrollment in PHD program,  get involved in some idea which might become next Google. Or a developer, where salary is good, work range is diverse, from system deployment to operations management, from front end developer to low level optimization. Plus you have weekends all to yourself, go read, trek, or play Casanova. My point is whenever these three roads meet, we must give a moment to ourselves and think.

I'm at this juncture, and although there are three roads, but there is always proxy road. For eg. you can do IAS, MBA or join some business venture. But for now, lets talk about development, say you join some company, you commit yourself to its goals, and get involved in various stages like testing, tool-making or interface development. The product gets released, and you enjoy it over Snacks and Booze with colleagues. In fact, every Friday you have #TGIF moment. However your product is actually out there, helping someone directly or indirectly. For example, today I found a startup named Soluto, and it offers a solution from which you can manage and repair the PC's located at your home, or your uncle's home. It is useful utility that one might want to have if your parents are not geek themselves. On the other hand, I have many bleak examples of people, whose contribution never saw the light of the day, or saw but were unable to survive. Another thing that I find amusing about the development, is that sometimes you keep developing stuff, that is already out there, like cloud storage service, which Dropbox first offered, is now offered by Microsoft, Amazon too. And even when you are done with development, other party has already gained some momentum in market. There is a little fun in that, at least to me. I'm also well aware about the history of big punks like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook etc, and what I can gather is that all of them came up with one original product, which were all awesome, and then they kept exploiting their product to extend in the ways, that lead to development of Google+(Facebook), GoogleDrive(Dropbox)  and much more.
And I think most of the people have grown into this practice, and our Software Engineering science has grown into managing these kind of things.

And now let's talk about "research", the word is cool in itself, to find things that we were unable to see till now, although they were there. And when I talk about research, I mean to put invention, discovery and adventure all in the same context. It is what I thought the research was, when I first joined, but gradually I learned that Research is more like years of Jazz and Blues with one night of Rock or Karaoke night. You don't always get expected results, you need to pick right problem at right time. In research your valuation depends on what you deliver, and what you deliver has nothing to give to present generation, than you must become Professor or something, because world moves most part of Research, and at some point of time you might wanna ride on it. But there are guys, who rides their passion like a Dothraki stallion, and their research might shake the world. In research, you must have a clear notion of what satisfies you, you may get satisfied if you are making tools that make it easier for people to work in certain domains. There can be thousand things that you can expect from research, for example Richard Feynman used to teach when he was not working on some problem, and we all know that he was one of the greatest teacher. Same goes for David Hilbert, he used to do research and touch the boundaries of his subjects and when he got enough hang of that subject, he would  shift his focus on another subject and pursue it like a newbie, and finishes it like a master, by giving something valuable to the subject.And as for Paul Erdos, it was always to meet new minds at new places, and collaborating with almost everyone who has a good problem in his hands.

All these are very crude examples, cause I'm just a simpleton, yet the process to research is that tad simple. I hope I've made a quite distinction between these two roads, and it might help me to sort out some of the hidden notions involved.

Ronak