Industry researchers don't do things in public and don't publish? Lame purposes and helps no one?

Again I just can't relate any of that to what I know at all!

When I finished my PhD I moved into industry and basically kept working on the same project. I work for a megacorp, and almost everything I do is developed fully in the open (public GitHub repo, not a mirror), we publish several times a year at the same venues I did in academia, and everyone is free to benefit from what I work on from using the code, reading the code, reading the papers etc.

And this isn't unusual. I know many many people in the academic community who do almost exactly the same thing. Look at everyone in Microsoft Research, Oracle Labs, IBM TJ Watson, etc.