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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.)
- VNC - which is a multiplatform Remote administration tool.
- Text to speach.
- Multimodal data access
- Handwriting recognition.
- Wlan technologies
Probably many more which I cant even remember.There is no god
He's an endowed prof at my alma mater www.tamu.edu. Hope this improves the CS program there.
When travelling, it's ok if the airlines lose your emotional baggage.
Now that's way too much to expect. If research was easy surely everyone would win nobel prizes??
You cannot really expect research to spring up from nowhere just like open source software, the background needed is completely different.
While becoming a *very* competent developer/architect etc. is withing reach of most smart people around with sweat and hard work, becoming a research is definitely not! Not many people got what it takes and the willpower to gather the knowledge you need just to get started...
My 2 cents...
...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
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!
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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.
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.
I remember, back in 1987 or so, getting a good look at a computer industry study that showed gross revenues, margins, and so forth for pretty mich all of the companies in what one would consider "the computer industry" of the time. It also showed how much they spent on R&D.
Sperry spent a decent amount; so did Cray, and Hewlett Packard, and AT&T, and NCR, and so forth.
IBM spent more on R&D than the rest of them put together.
In fact, IBM spent more on R&D than the gross revenues of the second-largest company. Not the profits, mind you -- the gross revenues.
That was the single most gobsmacking business statistic that I heard until the one a couple of years ago about how Microsoft could purchase the airline industry out of its cash reserves -- twice .
Except that the career path has been eroding. The number of full-time faculty positions (to say nothing of tenured positions) have been declining, so people spend more and more time in post-doc limbo. Getting your degree is not the difficult part of the career - getting an actual full-time position is.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
At least in the case of Bell Labs, this is hardly a fair criticism. Of the technologies listed -- transistor, laser, Unix, C -- all were developed while AT&T was a regulated monopoly. AT&T was not allowed to go into businesses other than telecommunications and their profits were restricted. Within those limitations, the transistor revolutioned telephone switching systems (stored-program control switching in the early 1960s), the laser eventually revolutionized transmission systems (fiber optics), and Unix and C had an enormous impact on operations support systems and other software applications within the Bell System. Certainly Bell Labs was successful at applying these technologies to design and build a network whose low costs and high reliability were the envy of the world at that time.