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.