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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.)
They laid off two-thirds of the company. It would be odd if Research wasn't similarly decimated (triated?).
I wonder if the "Open Source" is picking up the slack in basic research these days. I don't think Universitys have been too productive in my lifetime.
...isn't any one company or research centre closing or being made ineffective. Single institutions grow, evolve and die - they have their golden eras and their stagnant eras. When they're no longer useful or vibrant a new research centre crops up. Innovative scientific progress comes in jumps and spurts and doesn't follow a project plan.
.COM bust there's not been any funding for new research centres. There is therefore no chance for a new centre to have its creative spurt, and nowhere for today's creative minds to go.
The real tragedy is rather that with the
I don't think we should be trying to revive dying scientific centres at all, or singling out individual ones. Instead money should be going into research and development in general based on the merits of the research. Fix the general problem and give our best thinkers the chance to do their stuff.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
As the article points out, a lot of people are also moving into the academia, not necessarily back into the industry. Perhaps they're happier working in academic environments - atleast that way, they get to have their knowledge and findings out in the open.
However, what the article fails to mention is that a lot of corporate researchers like this guy are increasingly looking at the industry as a means of getting their research done.
This is an issue not just with AT&T, but lots of other research labs out there. If you look at some of the top conferences on AI, Graphics and the like (SIGGRAPH for instance) - you have an alarmingly high percentage of people performing cutting edge work from Microsoft Research.
So, it does look like MS-R is becoming a destination for a lot of good researchers out there - however, the collective prowess of other places like IBM, Intel and Xerox might just be able to bring in a balance.
The good thing is that this brings money for research and researchers. The bad thing is that all the patents of tomorrow in a lot of the cool technologies will be 0wnzer0ed by MSFT - where would that lead OpenSource in terms of a future - if all the technology that is to come is patented?
Its a double edged sword.
Well, this is a very common problem. I remember when I went for interviews in 2000...all the reps at Raytheon and Boeing were saying how a huge part of their workforce was going to retire, and all that knowledge was going to walk right out the door.
Clearly, your hiring patterns have to be continuous. You can sit out economic cycles, but you can't sit out entire generations.
It's a nice idea - every company has their own pure research division to solve all those interesting problems, and the IP stays within the company... except, very few companies can afford to do this.
Then again, look at what's come out of these sorts of pure research labs: C, UNIX, WIMP interfaces, etc., even Java, to some extent, could well be considered the output of such a process.
These aren't technologies you can bottle and sell. The value of these sorts of things is the productivity gains they provide. That's not to say the bottle and sell it approach hasn't been tried, but in the end the real meat is often in the abstract ideas, and even with the current patent system you can't patent purely abstract concepts. That is, all these ideas have been cloned, reinvented, or otherwise copied in one form or another.
Which brings me to my point - if you can't bottle it and sell it, if your competitors are just going to end up making a near duplicate anyway, why are you trying to fund this research lab all by yourself? No one doubts the quality of the work that can come out of these places, so why aren't there more cases of a group of various companuies banding together to fund a research group*? I'm not even talking about joining up with your direct competition - surely it wouldn't be that hard to have a group of companies that are not directly competing yet are all interested in managing to bring about a new, better, computer interface etc.
This "go it alone" attitude is sinking a lot of potentially incredibly valuable research simply because companies don't seem to be able to cooperate.
Jedidiah
* Note, for instance, that OSDL is exactly this sort of thing. A research group funded by a wide range of backers all interested in pushing forward computing. And it seems to be a model that's working well!
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
At least the research in university isn't (as) tainted as in the industry. If we can get the top researcher to make great and open contributions to the science, it's all the better.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
It's the Carly Fiorina touch.
I'm sure she offed much of the Labs because there was no short-term sales potential for a lot of what they were doing. And as a sales dweeb, that's all she can understand.
(See also Compaq, Alpha CPUs, HP, Itaniuam servers, the HP 3000 series etc)
I swear that woman and Celine Dion are the evillest twins on earth.
To have ambition was my ambition.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Actually it has been going on both ways - people moving from the industry to the academia and from the academia to the industry.
Just as an example, think of Jerry Yang and David Filo, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy - just to mention a few - all these people could have remained in the academia but chose to go to the industry instead.
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!
That is the problem - the kind of monolithic no-holds-barred and no-questions-asked environment that Bell Labs provided is gone - that is what the article sought to mention towards the end. Sure, you can do something at the Universities, but not at the scale that it happened at Bell Labs.
So, it really brings us back to the question - Is fundamental research really happening, or is all research now being funded solely based on what Wall Street wants?.
It looks more and more like the days of research for the sake of in and itself are slowly coming to an end.
Like aerospace and military, the telecoms industry did push early days computers. However it has been the industrial sector and since then the consumer sector which has driven the smaller, faster and cheaper computing.
For example, one might argue that modems were a spin off from Rockwell aerospace. However, that would have left us with 300 baud modems the size of a PC. It took the comsumer age to drive us to 56k Compact Flash format modems.
We have a lot to thank the pioneers for, but after a while they get beyond their usefulness/effectiveness.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In the CS area they are certainly very active. Check it out.
This is just the tip of the iceberg: for the past hundred years or more, the rest of the industrialized world looked to the United States for advanced research, innovative ideas and new technologies, if not new products. Now we are being surpassed on nearly every level, and we have no-one to blame but ourselves. Time for us to get the lead out, get back to work, and start competing again. I'm sick and tired of hearing about how we can't compete with near-slave labor, how India has raised so many super-smart engineers and scientists that we don't have any hope ... that's baloney. We are the ones that proved to the rest of the world that there is a better way, that abject poverty need not be the lot of the average human being. I simply don't believe that after a mere two hundred-odd years America has peaked: we can get back on track if we accept a few facts.
The Japanese have always looked at business as a kind of battleground. China and India are taking much the same tack with us. Now that's fine: there's nothing wrong with stiff competition, in and of itself. If you understand that and work hard to improve your own operations, everyone wins.
The problem is we, as a nation, haven't fully realized that we're smack in the middle of an economic war. Certainly our corporate leaders have not: they are, in fact, actively giving aid and comfort to the enemy! Were they in the military, they would be summarily executed for profiteering. These people, as well as many members of the government, need to be made aware of some things. For example, I don't believe that good business practices should involve the total destruction of one's own workforce (and just incidentally, one's best customers) nor should it involve massive transfers of technology and proprietary information to foreign "partners". Partners who, I might add, are more than likely to simply take that information while giving nothing in return. Protectionism (in the sense of the government dropping huge tariffs on foreign suppliers) is not a real answer, but on the other hand simply giving away everything you have of value, everything you have spent years and billions of dollars to develop, is just plain stupid. Yet that is precisely what is going on.
I'm sure that most of us know of companies that took their manufacturing and/or engineering operations to China, say, and then found themselves to be nothing but hollowed-out marketing organizations totally dependent upon foreign suppliers. We allow this to happen, because they don't perceive "good business" in the same way the Western world does, and we don't understand that. At all. That doesn't mean we can't do business with China to the benefit of all, but we simply have to learn how to do it.
I'm reminded of Yamamoto's words after the attack on Pearl Harbor: "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant." Well, I think it is past time that America woke up from it's decades long slumber and started to compete again. It can be done: we just have to convince each other of that fact, be willing to accept significant changes in the way we do business, and convince Congress to let us do it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
What is interesting is that AT&T was able to afford their great labs because their government-granted monopoly gave them a guaranteed revenue stream.
In the early 20th century, basic phone service in the U.S. was a mess, much like the current situation today with cell phone service. AT&T, the biggest player, managed to convince the government that phone service was a natural monopoly and that they were in the best position to be the ones to run that monopoly.
This freed them from financial pressures. There was no Wall Street pressure to "increase profitability" because if they did, the regulators would say they're making too much and would mandate reductions in the rates charged to customers. On the other hand, as long as Bell Labs kept coming out with neat stuff (such as, geez, you didn't even mention the transistor?) the regulators would be happy to let the customers subsidize this because everyone would benefit in the end.
After the breakup in 1984, phone service got way cheaper (I mean, I can call China for 2 friggin' cents a minute) but competition forced phone companies to focus on short-term costs.
As for the end of Bell Labs: I'm just suprised it didn't happen 20 years ago, when AT&T stopped being a legal monopoly, and had to start acting like a business.
We lost a lot when that happened. Not just all the cool computer science and communications tech. Lots of pure science too.
And a nasty change in the way the phone business worked. In the old days, telephone equiment was made by well-paid, well-treated workers in the U.S. and Canada. And made to last. And when it finally did wear out, it was shipped back to Western Electric factories, where it was thoroughly recycled. Now phone hardware is made by underpaid peons in overseas sweatshops, designed to last a year or two, and finally tossed in a landifll.
But, as the Libertarians love to say, There Is No Free Lunch. (Which is not strictly true, but that's another story.) The price of AT&T's huge contributions to science and expense-blind corporate citizenship was immense. Phone calls were expensive, and telephone equipment could only be leased (it was illegal to sell it) at high rates. Forget going out and buying a cheap modem -- if you wanted to do dialup, you had to lease a "data set" (a huge, clunky slow terminal-modem combination) for a horrendous rate. Not that modems weren't availabe -- starting in the 70s, they were, and cost less to buy than a month's lease on a data set. But it was illegal to hook them directly to the phone system (they might break something!). Which is how the acoustic coupler got invented.
There are what, 100 million internet-connected computers and devices in the US? Probably a similar number of cell phones. Back in the 70s, when the Bell System was at its peak that's how many phones there were total. And only a tiny number of them were mobile or used to transmit data. I can't imagine such a geological shift in technology with AT&T continuing its total dominance of the communications marketplace. And without AT&T, no Bell Labs.
Microsoft pours billions into research each year and from what I can tell they have not produced a product for MS or even a seminal non-commercial work.