Apple should take a big chunk of that money and put it into broad-reaching research and development. It should create something like DARPA, which has an annual budget of three billion dollars, or the old Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, or even like the old General Electric Research Laboratory, which in 1909 hired a brilliant young scientist named Irving Langmuir and told him to work on whatever interested him. He went on to help invent the incandescent light bulb, and he became the first industrial chemist to win the Nobel Prize. …Whether true or not, the public eventually comes to believe that behind every great fortune lies a crime. Having a sweeping research lab, which continues to invent things that help both the company and the public, can soften a harsh reputation. That, in fact, is the model that Bell and Xerox used, more or less. They were both monopoly companies who got some slack because of all the good they did. Microsoft has created all kinds of important things through its extensive R.&D. On Monday, it announced that its research labs were releasing a product for tracking child pornography. It also has come up with FetchClimate, a research project to help climate scientists analyze massive amounts of data. People often say that Google’s pursuit of a driverless car is a sign of corporate A.D.D. Perhaps that’s true; but driverless cars could ultimately save hundreds of thousands of lives.