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AT&T Labs vs. Google Labs - R&D History
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a piece looking at the history of corporate R&D, in response to an article on the BusinessWeek site essentially calling the telecommunication giants aging fossils of communication. The Ars piece looks as several innovations to come out of the AT&T Labs over the years, as well as the era of innovation brought on by the Cold War." From the article: "The Cold War, with its 'Pentagon socialism', combined with large corporate monopolies that were expected to provide lifetime employment and pensions, made for something of a golden age for American technological innovation. This is the era that brought us the transistor and the predecessor to the Internet, an era where all the seeds of today's 'information economy' were sown and carefully cultivated at great private and public expense. The great labs of this era--Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM's labs--were places with massive budgets, where the world's top scientists were invited to pursue "blue sky" research into areas with no immediately apparent commercial applications. The facilities were state-of-the-art, and there was no pressure from management or shareholders to do anything but science for science's sake."
Meanwhile, back in America, a perfect storm of rent-seeking behaviors by entrenched players, a broken patent system, a lack of substantial corporate oversight, and old-fashioned executive greed threatens to drown the fabled "two entrepreneurs in a garage" just as surely as those two guys helped sink the blue sky research labs of the Cold War era.
I love America. God Bless the USA.
While Google is definitely doing some cool stuff, what they are creating, and the environment that they are creating it in can't really compare in scope to what happened back in the heyday of big r&d. Google Maps/Earth is cool, but how does it compare to shaping everyones lives like color tv and the transistor. The innovations of Google are significantly more evolutionary vs revolutionary.
We used to call it Bell Labs. Getting a job there was like the ultimate geek cred.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You know the world of today sucks when you're nostalgic for your parents good old days.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
What is this thing (tilts head), pensions?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Take those "go-getters" of the hey-day, compare the educational curriculum, pop culture, and political philosophies of their childhood to those of our children today.
Just a hunch, but I suspect that comparison will show darker times ahead for the U.S.
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
One of my dream when I was young was to enter Bell Labs as a top notch scientist/engineer. I had indeed been there in late 90's and it was a down-hill ride. Partially, it is due to the fierce competition that drove down the revenue by 10+ folds. One minute long distance was $1 and you can get 1c now. Overall, industrial research institues need huge $$ support from their business.
^(oo)^pig~
...is a insult to R&D. Bell Labs came out with some very innovative ideas that helped change the world while Google is just a Ad-cramed database on steroids - but nothing special that won't soon be duplicated by SE Asian programmers making $0.85/hour.
Google has some of the best scientists around. Yet what do google labs give us? autocomplete for search strings? The only thing that seems worthy of notice in Google labs is google sets, which has that 'next gen AI search' feeling to it.
:)
The same goes for Microsoft research: while there are some gems in there, you will see people presenting research on new ways for drag and drop and similar stuff. While that's useful, it's nowhere near what IBM, PARC and others were/are doing. Even Sun seems to have cooler research projects.
Either those next generation companies are not as scientifically inclined as the old 'dinasaurs', or maybe the truly amazing stuff MS/Google have is hidden from prying eyes till the market is ready for them
The type of R&D that does not have a specific company use yet like mentioned in the headline seems to be directly tied to the companies desire for short term financial goals. If you think only about the next quarter, your R&D budget is limited to an ROI in the following quarter. HP comes to mind here. Once a computing and electronic power house but now seems not much more then Dell. I used to work in communications, electronics, and the nuclear power fields including calibration labs and depot level repair facilities. Every place I ever worked had top notch HP test equipment. Frequency counters and generators, transciever testers, O-scopes, signature analyzers, power supplies, time response testing equipment blah blah blah. I think everyone agrees that the HP printers have gone down hill as well. I remember the tank 5Si that seemed to still chug along with little maintenance after 3 million pages, even many of the 4 series.
And then comes a series of decade-long court battles over who invented what.
Take for example the Xerox PARC "Unistroke" patent. I happened to visit PARC before I saw the first PalmOS machines come out, and saw Unistroke in action. Some conference rooms had wall-mounted "sign up" devices on the wall by the door, which offered unistroke entry. PalmOS comes out with a very similar "Graffiti" concept. Great fit for the idea-- arguably better than the whole-word recognition that Apple Newton was trying. Several years pass where everyone who was anyone learns how to jot down stuff in Graffiti. And then the lawyers got involved. Over ten years later, the dust is starting to settle, and for what?
And those who didn't enter their thoughts in one-stroke alphabets entered their thoughts with teeny two-thumb keyboards. Hm, that sounds familiar... RIM Blackberry vs who was that?
No matter which side you choose to support, and I think everyone's put forward good arguments for and against every conceivable angle, when it ends up in court, everyone loses .
Pure research is great. Xerox got burned in the whole Apple Lisa / Macintosh thing, so they sorta swung the other way with Unistroke. There has to be a middle ground, though. Right?
[
Well: about Telco do not expending any money in R&D, the same pattern apply to other sectors, last year Intel said would expend 450 million in R&D (just because they want to cut prices to compete with AMD). At the same time, Samsung said that wants to replace Intel and to do so they will spend 1.2 Billon, Intel then expands its R&D to 1.5 Billon, so the new processors that Intel has developed are thanks Samsung. The moral is that R&D is not in the American corporation vocabulary, R&D and personnel are evils that if they can be never used (or replaced with something cheaper).
No, I refuse to think that is a digg title, the Digg story title reads something like:
OMG_HOW_GOOGLE_KICKZ_AT_T_LABS_AZZ_!!!1
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I really miss school. Now, all anybody wants is results.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
...has a large piece on antitrust legislation, ostensibly aimed at Wal-Mart. However, there's a fascinating section that links R&D investments with vertically-integrated companies. If a company specializes on only one thing, it's in its best interest to invest heavily in R&D to make sure its widget is in front of the competition for years to come.
What produces large, vertical businesses? Anti-trust legislation with teeth. The Reagan (and Clinton) administrations did a lot of damage to antitrust law, and paved the way for extremely horizontal organizations. Not only did this destroy visionary R&D shops, but it's responsible for today's monopolistic bullies.
Yay, free market capitalism!
Google is a business. It is interested in making profits in the forseeable future.
So, while it probably does some basic research, it's mainly known for incremental innovations.
It didn't invent the Internet Search Engine, it built better one.
It didn't invent web based mapping, it just made a more natural feeling one.
It didn't invent Ajax, it just crystalized what was in the air about DHTML, DOM and web applications.
Of course, arguably nearly every invention refines something else. The transistor was a replacment for the vaccum tube,and it was used in similar circuits, accounting for the fact it's a trannsconductance device. But its underlying operating principle was completely different; and it would be decades before enough of the wrinkles could be ironed out that it seroiusly began to replace vaccum tubes.
That's the kind of long term research that efficient organizations don't do, at least if efficiency is defined as having focus on returns in the forseeable future. Yet, no inefficient state sanctioned monopoly working on inefficient defense grants, no transistor. No transistor, no integrated circuit. No IC, not computer, no Internet, no Google.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The question back then was, "How can we outdo the rest of the world?"
The question today is, "How can we maximize our ROI?"
Once money becomes the driving goal above all else quality and innovation suffers.
This article doesn't even mention ATT's role in inventing UNIX, without which it's hard to imagine any UNIX-like OSs.
Google depends on Linux, which again, probably wouldn't be around had it not been for ATT's UNIX.
This isn't to disparage Google, who are still cool in my book, and will probably do something as revolutionary as UNIX.
Google's doing some good stuff, given what they have to work with compared to the kind of money AT&T/Bell Labs had. I mean, Bell Labs more or less developed LED's, UNIX and C, so you can just imagine the kind of budget that requires!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs
stuff |
While I've read about the huge shift to commercial/applied science, it seems to me a lot of pure research is still of the "let's find out what we can and damn the applications" variety. While the only things that come immediately to mind are cosmology and some of the "research" branches of physics, I'm sure there is more out there that doesn't demand a consumer product as the end result. I'd like to see a resurgence of long term projects with big money backing and no worries about being canned like what happened in 1993 to the huge super-collider in Texas. Who knows what may have come out of that, perhaps more advanced/larger ones have been brought online in the meantime, but we could have had at least some of those results sooner. Are there even any agencies (Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, DOE, etc) who are willing to fund a "we're OK with no results but knowledge gained" project in what is currently considered an applied science field?
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I remember Alan Kay saying that Xerox wasn't easy on Xerox PARC. It was PARC's directors that shielded the researchers from the corporate pressure and gave them the time and space to do their work. Not Xerox'. So I don't think these historical companies had a grand vision of research. They had good research directors. Note also that some well known projects survived because they were kept below the management's radar and caught on outside the research lab. Both UNIX at ATT and HTML/HTTP at CERN took off partly because the management didn't care much about them.
Although you got modded down, I was thinking about what companies are like Bell Labs/PARC/etc. today. It's a pretty short list. I'd say that IBM is still on there; they still do some stuff that gets into pure research, although I think it's become more market-focused than it used to be; Google strikes me as someone who is trying to take up the helm that was dropped by Xerox PARC -- a combination of marketable stuff and real blue-sky tech ... but I think a lot of other research has moved from the corporate sphere to the realm of small startups. \
It seems like people who are coming out of grad schools now don't hope to get a position as a Fellow at IBM as much as they hope to get a big wad of funding from somebody (usually without thinking too hard about who "somebody" might be) and playing the startup game. Even though as a startup, you usually don't have much flexibility or opportunity to do research, it's all about productization.
I'm still not sure though that I would put Google into the same category as the old research companies of the Cold War era. Google's stuff is good, and it's definitely innovative, but in many cases it looks less like actual new knowledge development than just new and different ways of recombining existing stuff. That definitely has value -- don't get me wrong -- but it's different than the huge amount of capital investment and long time horizons that used to be the norm at Bell Labs, for instance.
Honestly I think it's the time horizon issue that's the worst part of today's market. I don't know if it's a product of instability -- nobody is sure what's going to be going on in 5 years, so they only plan for two -- or if it's just the desire to make short-term gains, but I think that we're starting to see the effects of lots of places not having a very coherent long-term strategy. Stagnation is bad, but a certain amount of predictability in the market can be good, if it lets people plan for longer, and thus take bigger calculated risks.
Nobody is willing to pay for research that might take 10 or more years to productize in today's market, and thus the burden falls on government and academia. They're basically some of the only institutions left that can afford to plan in multiple-decade ranges.
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Bell Labs
-Information Theory
-LEDs
-C/C++
-UNIX
-WLAN
-6 Nobel Prizes
Google Labs
-PageRank
-AJAX Mail Client
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The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
You're not a "patent troll" if you actually have an R&D department. I'm given to understand that Bell Labs actually employed more engineers than attorneys at one point.
In 2005, Microsoft spent about $7 billion on research and development (R&D). By 2008, the R&D budget will grow to $8 billion. If my memory serves, no American company spends more money on R&D than Microsoft.
The research division at Microsoft is the #1 industrial laboratory in the United States. To understand the magnitude of the largesse, note that Microsoft succeeded in convincing several tenured/tenure-tracked professors at top-notch private universities (e.g. Stanford University) to quit the university and to join Microsoft.
Like the pre-breakup AT&T, Microsoft is funneling its monopolistic profits into a massive R&D budget. Microsoft laboratory has become the "Bell Labs" of the 21st century.
The decline in new and glorious innovations is undoubtedly caused by the fact that we've already invented everything ground breaking that can be invented. What a boring world we live in now. We'll look back on these years and realize that since the coming of the Segway humans have done all we can do...
jk
For all the innovation to come out of bell labs (and I'm using some of it to type this message), they still never seemed to get what counts. I still have my grandmother's last phone, a western electric desk phone (with dial) that she "rented" for $5/month for as long as I knew her. She paid literally hundreds of dollars for that phone. I can go buy a phone at Wal-mart now for $5 that has more features than that beast. I love Unix, don't get me wrong, but you'd think they could have come up with something practical for their customers.
Do you have ESP?
I have had arguments before with people from the telcom industry (for simplicity I am lumping cable co's with telephone co's) before in slashdot and other chat groups. What always astonishes me is how blind people in the telcom industry are. It's as if customers everywhere are yelling loudly to the telcos "YOU SUCK!" and their response is "So your monthly bill starts on the 5th and includes a system access fee of....". They are totally immune to the level of hatred customers have for them. For now they have us by the gonads. Who else are we going to get our TV, phone, and internet from? They have thought this way for so long they don't have any other way of thinking. This is why they don't see what's over the horizon, or even care.
As time goes by and wireless becomes more of an option these companies will continue to think the same way. There will be bumps along the way. Telcos will get laws passed and harass any attempts at competition. But competition will find a way, I would bet on wireless providers and wi-fi. When that day comes and customers call up to cancel their service, there will be technicians and VP's alike crying on TV about there jobs disappearing. They did it to themselves so don't pity them. Serious investment in R & D, whether by government or private industry, is necessary to stay competitive in the future. That's just a fact of life.
Listen folks. I know it's difficult to comprehend but the golden days of the Industrial Revolution are over. It's time for a lull. We will continue to see small incremental changes in our tech (computers getting smaller/faster) but nothing life-changing for some time. Look at the pervasiveness of e-mail, cellular phones, the home computer, high speed internet. We'll need a generation or two in this brave new world before we can make the next step. Anyways, I'm getting a little long winded so I'll just close by saying we're in the process of moving from the Industrial Revolution into the Energy Revolution.
Cheers,
~b
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
So having a monopoly flush most of our money down the toilet is ok as long as 1% of it is going to a pie in sky research lab? Anyone today with enough smarts to come up with 'the next big thing' can easily support themselves and devote 90% of their life to a project if they choose to do so.
;)
We will have far fewer great discoveries and inventions compared to the past century for a very simple reason, all of the stuff capable of being invented and discovered by one person has mostly passed. It now takes a huge team of specialized skills just to make an incremental improvement over a past invention, let alone discovering something totally new and breakthrough. The knowledge needed to make a great discovery spans many fields, and is impossible for one person to master, of course there are always exceptions, like Al Gore
The post summary seems to suggest that Ars Technica is defending the telcos as innovators against the BusinessWeek attack of them as dinosaurs. This is a misleading interpretation of the tone of the article. Ars Technica merely qualifies and nuances the BusinessWeek stance with a deeper analysis of the past and present state of "blue sky" research versus commercially driven research. But the charge against the telcos as non-innovators and even as suppressors of innovation still stands:
In today's more agile economy, where workers hop from job to job and businesses spring up from nowhere to dominate an industry in the span of half a decade, there's no longer anything in the private sector like the enduring safety of the Ma Bell monopoly to lavishly support a blue sky research lab. The closest we have today is Google's "20 percent time," where engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever research project strikes their fancy. But 20 percent isn't 100 percent.
Under Bush.....?
Hell I'd settle for any science *at all*, regardless of the expense.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Perhaps the world has moved on (at least a little) from the type of research the people here like to discuss. Drugs and biotech seem to me to be the big money research areas at the moment- besides the huge government subsidies and highly regulated markets they also have the "think of the children" factor helping to pay for any toy they bring to market.
That company started acting like a bureaucratic siv. Towards the end of the glory days, there were as many slackers doing "research" as folks doing actual work. My group was bounced around from project to project with no focus. We were aligned with Bell Labs, therefore AT&T groups wanted our expertise... even if it was for stupid shit like "add some ksh code to our home-grown ksh database system". Like WTF??
I could go on and on...
That was when UNIX was invented, these old school labs were still operating & inventing stuff like the internet (sorry Al Gore). When women voters and black activist groups had more of the power that they diserve through high-profile media attention and grass roots campaigning. There was a sense of change in the air and right wing nut-jobs lost offices and dodged impeachment because of illegal activites in high office instead of holding the nation hostage. For actual progress of everyday american citizens, yeah: I'll call it the good old days.
P.S. It's coming up on 10 years since the mid 90's. Am I the only one who would give anything to hear the top story on the news being about cigars and blue dresses instead of what we're seeing today?
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Look at every generation, and its parent generation and... you'll see that not generations were equal, as scientific progress goes. It goes up and down like a yoyo, and it did so since the beginning of time.
E.g., ancient Egypt must have started with some really bright minds, since they discovered a lot of things. And I mean including a ton of medical and other stuff, not just how to pile stones in a pyramid. Yet right before the macedonian invasion it was already at a stage where nothing much was invented any more. Medicine for example had been solidified into something that was religion, law and malpractice insurance rolled into one, and everyone just followed the same official texts literally, and never tried anything new. For _millenia_.
E.g., in Europe the golden ages of Greece and Rome were followed by what we call the "Dark Ages". It's not just that they discovered fewer things, it's that actually a lot of information has been _lost_ in that time.
E.g., take China. It was at one point one of the most technologically advanced places. They have a long list of inventions, including stuff from paper to gunpowder to trebuchets to crossbows (including the repeating kind) to the compass to god knows what else that they invented more than a millenium before the Europeans. They were _that_ advanced. Even their less glamorous stuff, e.g., the composite bow, might get less hype, but you can see its efficiency against European equipment and tactics when it was brought over by the Huns.
Yet then came an age of decline and it ended up with the Manchu Qing dynasty, where literacy actually decreased and the government was literally more concerned with enforcing a uniform haircut (yes, I'm not joking) than with any kind of science or technology pursuit. The Chinese army actually regressed from having _some_ guns during the Ming dynasty, to all spears, swords and bows during the Qing dynasty. That sad.
Or take Japan. Yes, now they're doing damn good technologically and have been even more impressive as progress goes during the Meiji Restoration. But before that they had periods when it stagnated or even regressed. E.g., the Heian period, also remembered for the rise of the Samurai caste, is also considered by some a time of stagnation and even regress.
So, yes, times can change. Sometimes for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Some societies fail to give those "mundane Joes" incentive to go and learn or research something. Yes, each individual can decide what to do with his life, but if on the whole it's a smarter or more popular choice to aim low intellectually, people may well do just that. And then stagnation and even regress follow.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What happened, as best I can tell, is that shortsighted corporate executives forgot that (applied) R&D rarely produces new fundamental knowledge about the universe while that is the main goal of pure research. A lot of great research is done when true scientists are given a budget that has already been written off by the bean counters, as IBM and (the old AT&T's) Bell Labs demonstrated many times.
The problem is that such research tends to be very expensive and non-geeks just aren't interested in results they can't understand. The only reason we have nuclear power today is that the United States was willing to spare no expense to develop a bigger and better bomb in order to win WWII quickly an decisively. Nazi Germany sponsored a lot of good science and then took some of the results with military potential and did a tremendous amount of R&D to create amazing new military technologies...tech that just happens to have had amazing commercial potential. Jet aircraft and booster rockets come to mind.
You will hear NASA fans gripe because now that the Cold War is over, NASA has to justify whatever it does to the drones in government who get paid to eliminate government waste. NASA is no longer a great source of new scientific and technical knowledge, but it probably could be again. So could a lot of private enterprises if NASA and other parts of the U.S. government didn't have a practical monopoly on many interesting areas of research.
For major research projects to get significant funding now, they either have to have tremendous (and fairly obvious) commercial potential, or be extremely trendy, in a politically correct sort of way. No expense (to the taxpayers) is spared protecting "endangered species" that (AFAIK) have no real significance except that they are about to succumb to Darwin's Law -- despite all the bleating of the ecowackos, wasting money on the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker is not going to produce new knowledge or improve the chances of Man surviving another century. Having plentiful, cheap sources of energy would.
But try to get money on the scale of the Manhattan Project for the purpose of finally developing nuclear fusion power plants... That is not by any means pure research, but the amount of pure research that can only be done with the kind of energy a large fusion plant could produce is staggering. But why stop with fusion? Total conversion seems about as likely to be a practical source of energy now as utilizing light pipes and orbital spacecraft as the backbone of a worldwide communications network did during WWII.
Do you think the U.S. might have fusion power plants online and/or total conversion reactors in the lab by now if such projects had received oh, say $100 BILLION dollars in additional research funding since WWII? That's a Big Pile O' Money! It also happens to be roughly what the U.S. has wasted on handouts to Israel since that nation was created by fiat in 1948. Why not just cut all foreign aid for non-humanitarian purposes (Israel gets only about 1/3 of the U.S.'s foreign aid largess, after all) and use the proceeds to fund a pure research lab or ten that are operated by private sector organizations that have track records of doing cutting edge research and producing useful knowledge?
Stop real government waste and use the savings to fund hard science research projects that short-sighted bean counters consider waste because they know no better, ignorant touchy-feely nitwits in search of warm fuzzies and/or vote generating pork-barrel projects that they are.
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
With that much money floating around, Microsoft research should be working on the CS equivalent of the Manhattan Project.
Instead we get type systems that attempt to address device driver crashing and security issues - things that would never have occured if the OS research had been done correctly up front.
Some of the Microsoft Cambridge stuff is better, but where is the beef?
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
This is an insult. AT&T Bell Labs invented UNIX, C, the transitor, and countless other things instrumental to the development of the telecommunications and computer industry. Google has a great text searching program. They didn't even really "invent" it either. They just built a much better one than anyone else had at the time. What else have they done lately? Sure you can rattle off a list of things but is any one of them REALLY useful for anything more than inflating their stock price? The only other thing they have that I would catagorize as remotely innovative is maps.google.com but the entire basis for that is the XmlRpcRequest usage which if you had to attribute it as an "invention" (which it's not) to someone you would have to give credit to Microsoft. Google Earth was purchased so they didn't invent that.
In a normal world, individuals create wealth, and that wealth creates discressionary money that eventually gets pooled into big R&D projects. But we don't live in a normal world, we live in a world with....
In sum, this "good ole days" story of real innovation is complete crap. Most of the innovation has happened inspite of these institutions, not because of them. In stead of giving credit to AT&T, give credit to the people who got fed up with AT&T, left it, and formed a small semiconductor startup in silicon valley. Instead of giving credit to IBM, give credit to enterpernual individuals who took their control away from their OS and proprietary interfaces causing a PC revolution. Instead of giving credit to Xerox-parc, give credit to those who acted inspite of xeroxes leanings to write off the technology as complete crap. In stead of giving credit to ARPA and the NSF, give credit to those who lied to congress thru their teeth to get the internet released for use in the private sector (hint it wasn't Al Gore). The only reason why innovation has ever happened is because individuals have been free enough to act inspite of these systems, not because of them. The USSR had a lot of innovation too, but it was useless without the freedom and liberty to apply and use it and most of it got burried and sidelined for just that reason. What people don't understand is that innovation is not about science and funding, it is about liberty and being able to apply it. Only when people understand that will real innovation come to take place.
Exactly what scientific breakthroughs or novel technology has Microsoft produced with its multi-billion dollar R&D budget? From what I can get, Microsoft is very good at making things that are bloated and often broken. Maybe you can tell me of something revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary and based on other's fundamental research and development) that has come out of Microsoft Labs?
Xerox PARC is what I think of when I associate nearly pure R&D with the personal computing industry. Apple and Microsoft are just techno-leeches where Xerox PARC is concerned. Microsoft Labs seems to be working on incremental, evolutionary R&D projects based on concepts and technology from other sources that M$ simply buys (licenses). Pardon me while I yawn...
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
In the end, what fueled the 1960s and 70s era of the corporate labs was the science: the invention of the transitor/solid state physics, quantum mechanics (which led to OOA/OOD!)., fiber optics/lasers, biochemicals (plastics) and thermodynamics (space race/rockets). You have to ask, is there anything revolutionary today? Any new inventions compared to what I listed?
So far I see nanotech, biotech, chaos theory and quantum computing as candidates to spark a revolution--an invention, but not in the near future considering we're all focused on corporate profits and "what the customer wants today".
I love these statements. They're almost as good as "I'll never..." statements.
Please bookmark this statement somewhere where you'll be able to look at it at least once a year.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
i have visited Lucent labs in jersey about 2 years ago - (this was once the main campus for Bell labs). Didn't seem to be very much going on. Bell/Lucent had even turned off the spinkler water feature near the reception of the building. Although they do still have this very cool room that is basically completely lit up by clear optical cable - it looks like something out of the movie "the Abyss" - but my guess is its purely for aesthetics. In any case it definitely looked like there was a fraction of the activity going on that once was happening here (empty offices, etc..). On another note - IBM still does a massive amount of research and a good portion of it might still be considered "blue sky" in the context of this article - but i dont see IBM as a coporation that is very consumer facing - more of a B2B.
and although I've never worked for, nor personally known anyone who has worked for Google Labs, they seem to be about the closest thing I've seen since.
Bell Labs served as the R&D arm of AT&T, Maw Bell, "The Telephone Company", a highly regulated utility. Because of it's monopolistic and legally protected position, AT&T back then through off copious amounts of cash, and was considered an exceptionally safe investment.
Bell Labs was funded by part of this cash flow and had an incredibly broad mandate towards basic research which showed up in the work people did, that often didn't have (immediate) commerical applications.
Unix, for instance - AT&T couldn't even sell it back then, due to their monopoly. But folks at The Labs kept on exploring, improving, conducting basic research into Operating Systems that we still benefit from decades later. My office mate at the time was working in fiber optics, and thought back then in 1984 that his work "might" have commericial telephony applications sometime past the year 2000 after the development of several enabling technologies.
Everyone was encouraged to present papers internally; every day there were loads of seminars and working groups during office hours and, of course, the informal meetings and brainstorming sessions that took place at pubs and strip clubs along the New Jersey coast.
Your manager typically was also doing his or her own research, and would help you to explore specific areas of interest that might not be precisely part of the department manadate.
Highlight of my time there: taking several lunchtime seminars in a new programming language called C++, presented by Bjarne Stroustrup himself.
I think Google with their model of lettign engineers do whatever they'd like one day a week is the best sustainable compromise between fully commericial companies such as Microsoft or Apple and pure research organisatins such as Bell Labs.
Short of government funded, open ended research military reseaerch - I did that as well, and while it may not seek to commericalise the research but they sponsors will have "other" uses in mind - it's probably the best thing we've got going for us right now.
I'll leave you with a toast that I picked up from some of the older engineers during my time at Bell. We used it during many an evening at the local strip clubs:
"Stronger Whiskey, Younger Woman, Faster Computers"
Ahh, the good old days.
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Having been to Bell Labs (Murry Hill NJ) and worked with some of the people when it was in its prime, I think the article fails to appreciate some history. First, AT&T is gone. And when it was recently brought by SBC it was a fraction of what it was.
Back in the day, there was AT&T which owned Bell Labs in Murry Hill NJ. This facility was the envy of every major company in the world. They did research in both hardware (physics, chemistry, integrated circuits, etc) and software (UNIX, C etc.) Of course they had their "feet on the desk noble prize winners" but the majority of the researches had goals that served the corporate interest. They did understand that fundamental science can pay off in the longer term, but today's short-sighted next quarter stock price mentality prevents this type of strategic thinking. For instance, AT&T developed in-house hardware and software because they needed a way to track (and bill) phone calls. They needed to understand fundamental physics and chemistry because deep sea cables and communication satellites are things that are not easily repaired.
Now what many people forgot, or don't know is that AT&T broke in two parts many years ago: AT&T Communications (took software R&D) and Lucent (took hardware R&D). Lucent took over Murry Hill as its HQ and AT&T Research moved to Florham Park, NJ. Lucent has since also spun off Agrere. AT&T sold their wireless business to Cingular, and what was left at that point went to SBC. So saying AT&T of today (a renamed SBC) is has a powerful research arm is like saying Micky Heart is the Grateful Dead. They do good stuff, but the magic is gone.
As for Verizon. Their only claim to fame is the biggest tax bamboozle ever pulled off by a company.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
They have the brainpower, they have the funding, they have search engines and thus an inexaustible supply of data that they've found some loose relations among. Yet, how much are the boundries computer intelligence being pushed by these companies? Well the honest answer is, I don't know. Anyways, based on what's visible to Joe public, it doesn't look like much beyond better searching, better spam filtering, and a little bit in the way of better robustness in IT systems... things like that. I mean, nothing even worth a crumby Slashdot headline, what gives guys? Google sets is kind of interesting but it doesn't seem like anyone has tried to do anything with it in a long, long time. Any of these players could buy pretty much anything they want so there's no need to start at ground zero. Buy out Cyc, rewrite its inference engine to scale massively. Buy out some natural language parsing / translation places. Use some combination of these, wordnet, wikipedia, answers, howstuffworks, and your own maps of the web to do some incredibly cool things. Yes, they'll also be incredibly hard but if you don't even have the faith to pursue this seriously on the side, how can you really think of yourself as the leading software company in the world?
That $7B includes all product development -Vista, next version of SQL server, etc, all in there.
The amount spent on "corporate research" is a lot less, probably no more than $100M, though that is a rough guess.
The other thing is yes, they've hired some great people. Lamport, for example. But hiring people because they did great work in the past does not mean they will do great stuff in your company. I've seen that in my own.
Not really new at all. Not that I'm trying to knock Microsoft, just that you are giving them credit for things others did decades ago.
In 1900:
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
of course, such details such as (to name a few) General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, came after that.
FTA "In today's more agile economy, where workers hop from job to job and businesses spring up from nowhere to dominate an industry in the span of half a decade, there's no longer anything in the private sector like the enduring safety of the Ma Bell monopoly to lavishly support a blue sky research lab. The closest we have today is Google's "20 percent time," where engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever research project strikes their fancy. But 20 percent isn't 100 percent."
I disagree. Microsoft research is one place where research is done just for the sake of it. Researcher there dont have deadlines to meet. They dont have the pressure of releasing products within some deadline. And they publish in world's best conferences and journals. I haven't seen many google researchers publishing papers in top-notch conferences or any conferences for that matter.
Quantum Computers.
Rapid molecule sorting and delivery.
500ghz CPU using silicon based materials.
New method to control atom-scale magnetism.
Invented Relational Database.
etc.
If you are disappointed, I recommend you do some of your own research on their research.
...that last section. Neat how the author threw in some words to appeal to all the anti-copyright kooks here and ensure it hit the front page of Slashdot. I'm no fan of companies whose business model is to sue over patents, who don't actually make anything or contribute anything to society/the market, but the blatant pandering to the nutball element soiled an otherwise very well done article.
I'm still not sure though that I would put Google into the same category as the old research companies of the Cold War era. Google's stuff is good, and it's definitely innovative, but in many cases it looks less like actual new knowledge development than just new and different ways of recombining existing stuff.
True and untrue.
Google is different than any other company that I know of in that they started as a research kind of project and still focus on that but they also seem to be able to be a publicly traded company that can put out profitable products and services almost as a by product of said research.
They have not been bought nor have they put their research in the back room, but as a forefront of what they do.
Bell labs did amazing stuff, same with Xerox PARC, etc. But AFAIK, the research was not their focus. Bell came out of telephones. A new technology at the time, but (again AFAIK) they were focused on furthering this invention. Xerox started with copiers, again a new technology, and furthered that with research.
Google, although their products are not really innovative, their method of making their products is. Searching is nothing new. Email is nothing new. Maps, directions, advertising, none of this is new. But their focus on the pure geek factor of being obsessed with how to make this stuff better, giving away tons of stuff for free or at least free of charge, and collecting profits from their popularity as an afterthought.
Their primary activity is searching. A seemingly trivial activity on the surface. But it has coined a word (Google as a verb) like Xerox (as a noun) did for a copy of something, but the difference is that Xerox copies were new to the world and were horrible by any modern standards today. The first Xerox copies took like 5 or 10 minutes or so per page (all of this is from memory), then came out wet and could be smeared. And people were grateful! Thus the word Xerox was born.
But Yahoo!, Altavista, and other search mechanisms of the day existed, but none of them became synonymous with the word search like Google has.
For that $5 rental, the phone CANNOT be broken. You cab probably drive a CAR over
it and it'd keep working. Your Walmart phone will probably break if you drop it once on the floor.
It may have been overengineered - but there was NO planned obsolence and LESS wasted materials.
A friend from college serverd in a support capacity for Microsoft Research (it's called Microsoft Research, BTW not "Microsoft Labs") for over 4 years. His take: smart people get let loose to investigate stupid things. It's a place people go to hide and play academic while getting industry rock star pay.
I'd like to call B.S. on your comparison to Bell Labs on another level: With software, people with good ideas just stand up and do them. It's not like you need massive R&D experiment or new materials development to explore different computational processes and concepts like you do in the physical world (i.e. try to create a transistor from scratch in 195X in your garage).
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Warren Buffet claims he doesn't know jack about technology (and that may well be true), but he knows businesses, and he knows his business well (he's basically an Encyclopaedia Capitalisma). Read from his lecture at Notre Dame. No one else seems to be saying this, but technological or scientific advancement is bad for preserving capital (we not talking millions, we're talking billions). For us small fry trying to eke out somewhere in the millions, technology probably isn't too destructive to capital, but hey, what do I know.
Microsoft R&D is, on most cases, not true R&D, but product development. The same can be said about Google. So far, big science funding by large corporations is solely represented by IBM, who funds research on fields from nanotechnology to biological research. Look at how many Nobel Prize winners they currently employ. Now tell me how many are working for MSFT. Do you really believe you compare some of the finest IBM research with, let's say, winFS? And what is good in IBM research is that some of this research is actually translated into profitable products, what let the shareholders happy enough to make them let the money flow to R&D without complaints.
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Actually I'd disagree with you on your second point if Mircosoft was resarching A.I., parsing colloquial speech in a reliable manner, extremely new ways in which to think of data, storage or programming. Basically anything that was a big leap.
If Microsoft Research is responsible for the new aspects of their products, then all they're really responsible is the the next building block on a pre-existing foundation. Then new or amazing there.
The question back then was, "How can we outdo the rest of the world?"
What makes things even more interesting is that in a nuclear-war-starts-in-5-minutes situation back then, I might have expected the panicked short-sighted "we need a quick-fix"-attitude of the present day. Yet, somehow the folks at the time were able to cool their minds and go for the long-term advancements.
I think there is a clear reason for that: the former Soviet bloc acted as a threat of real competition. At that time, there was no place to hide the loot had the Soviets won. But now there is no counterbalance and it's gone into just individuals looting as much pay-off from organizations as they can carry, since there is no threat of it being taken away. Even taxation has been reduced.