AT&T Labs' Brain Drain

Frisky070802 writes "The Newark Star-Ledger has an article on the brain drain at AT&T Labs, which laid off close to half its researchers two years ago this month, another good fraction last spring, and has lost many of the rest through voluntary departures. The article claims that only Microsoft might have the money to fund basic research as Bell Labs did years ago, though many (including me) would put IBM in the same camp. It cites problems at AT&T, ranging from researchers paying their own way to present at conferences to a loss of free espresso and bottled water. Many luminaries, such as Lorrie Faith Cranor, Avi Rubin, and Bjarne Stroustrup, are quoted --- with Stroustrup saying the lab was "mugged" by Wall Street. (Rumor has it that the losses haven't stemmed, with more top-notch researchers going to academia in the coming months.)" (Non-registration ZIP and age demographic collection.)

Comments

At&t labs, great contributer to computing.

[rkz]

It is very sad to see AT&T labs whittle away like this, over the years they were responsible for a number of great inventions:

1. VNC - which is a multiplatform Remote administration tool.
2. Text to speach.
3. Multimodal data access
4. Handwriting recognition.
5. Wlan technologies

Probably many more which I cant even remember.

Re:At&t labs, great contributer to computing.

[irokitt]

Ah, you forgot to mention the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and all of the immense contributions surrounding those two developments alone.
Unfortunately, I don't see Microsoft pursuing research quite like Bell/AT&T Labs has. And IBM is making contributions to software (Linux) and hardware (The processor in the Mac G5) but is not going to devote research to the breadth of things AT&T has focused on.
The good news is that most of the people leaving the Labs are going into academia, so quite a few CS departments are going to be improved.

ATT is not the only one

[alphakappa]

The brain drain from Industry to Universities has been going on for some time. For the past few years, the focus of Industry has been on developing marketable technologies, as would justify the investment of venture capitalists. Also with smaller companies working on bringing products to market faster, the pressure on bigger companies to preferentially fund tangible research has been more.
I don't know if research has suffered because of this - most basic research at American universities are funded by defense projects, and they are funded well. I'm not sure if this will produce the kind of innovative stuff that came out of Bell labs, but at least fundamental research is alive!

IBM

[afidel]

IBM does a LOT of research, but only a small percentage of it is the type of basic research that leads to BIG jumps in technology. In other words they do process refinement and some materials science research but very little basic science research that leads to the kinds of discoveries that brought about optical lasers, the transistor, etc.

Re:Academia

[Keeper]

If you're going to make fun of the work being done at Microsoft Research, you might want to do some 'research' yourself first. They're doing real research, as opposed to doing feature work for existing products.

The Plan9 team was more than decimated

[DrSkwid]

The lay offs at bell-labs have had a massive negative imapact on plan9.

Rob Pike has gone to google for instance

Stories of them taking out 75% of the light bulbs in the labs to save money.

We're down to three devs from the labs working on plan9, mostly in their own time.

So sad, Lucent have bungled it.