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AT&T Labs vs. Google Labs - R&D History

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-your-grampas dept.

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."

13 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. AT&T Labs? by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    1. Re:AT&T Labs? by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not anymore...

      For one, AT&T (and then Lucent, which acquired MOST of AT&T's R&D assets including the Murray Hill facility, which is now Lucent's HQ) began calling all of their product development divisions "Bell Labs" - More and more the term "Bell Labs" was used to describe standard product development instead of the classic "blue sky" research. That said, even around 2000, there was still a reasonable amount of "blue sky" work being done at Lucent Murray Hill - I was quite proud to intern there back then. I happened to be the only person in the entire department without a Ph.D. (with the exception of one other intern who was an M.S. student).

      Since then, that entire department has been disbanded, and from all I've heard, Murray Hill is a husk of what it used to be even five to six years ago. It's been the victim of both Lucent's overall decline due to a combination of mismanagement and the crash of the optical networking industry, and of the general change in corporate attitudes to "blue sky" research.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    2. Re:AT&T Labs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      AT&T Labs != Bell Labs after around 1996. At that time, Lucent was split off from AT&T and kept the original Bell Labs facility. About half of the researchers stayed at Lucent Bell Labs, and the others went to the newly formed AT&T Labs. If you follow the history of Bell Labs, you have to look both at what Lucent did to Bell Labs (heart-breaking) and what AT&T has been doing with their research division (slightly less so).

    3. Re:AT&T Labs? by frusengladje · · Score: 2, Informative

      Since then, that entire department has been disbanded, and from all I've heard, Murray Hill is a husk of what it used to be even five to six years ago. It's been the victim of both Lucent's overall decline due to a combination of mismanagement and the crash of the optical networking industry, and of the general change in corporate attitudes to "blue sky" research.

      While some of the decline can be certainly be attributed to mismanagement, the decline of the optical networking industry had very little to do with it. While they were certainly involved in some aspects of the optical networking market, that was never their primary market. Lucent is primarily involved in telecommunications infrastructure (Central Office switches, wireless base stations etc.). The two primary factors for the decline has been the consolidation of the telecommunications industry, and their lack of GSM wireless products for overseas markets (where most of the growth is occuring). The GSM problem is one of the primary reasons for the proposed merger with Alcatel (which is largely without wireless CDMA products).

    4. Re:AT&T Labs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      I worked in the Labs for 15 years. It was the best job.... until they decided to spinoff Lucent. It was all downhill after that. With AT&T chasing the ghost "MCI", they cut everything everywhere trying to get to the numbers MCI was claiming at the time. They sold off the cellular tech. right when cell technology became viable. Then came Mike Armstrong who finished gutting the company for the top exec's gain.

    5. Re:AT&T Labs? by anothy · · Score: 2, Informative

      this is a common misunderstanding, even by Bell Labs employees and management. Bell Labs never just meant the research folks. originally, way back when, all development was done by an organization called Bell Labs, then handed over to the business units, basically to market and sell. later, the development shops were pushed off into the business units. the employees were no longer under the head of Bell Labs on the org chart, but were still Bell Labs employees - all AT&T (later Lucent) technical employees are. i believe that was around divestiture in 1984. at that point, "core" Bell Labs (i don't believe that was ever an official term, but it was certainly common enough that everyone knew what you meant) consisted of Research and AT (i think it stood for Advanced Technology), which was essentially an in-house contracting shop. with the major restructuring of Bell Labs a little under a year ago by the then-new head (the largest restructuring since 1984, at least), AT is gone, Research is still there, and now they finally have groups with the explicit charter of taking research - real research - and bringing it into the product shops, something which had been missing since the development staff were moved under the business units.

      and, in my opinion, that's what primarily caused Lucent's collapse: a decade and a half worth of disconnect between possibly the most brilliant research organization on the planet and Lucent's product shops. it started in 1984, and the inertia was just so incredible that it took a decade and a half to catch up with them.

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      i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
  2. Re:Maybe they are not scientists but... by 'nother+poster · · Score: 3, Informative

    No we don't. Patent trolls BUY patents, or patent OBVIOUS things, and then use them as weapons for extortion. Bell Labs and PARC invented real technologies. I'm not saying that they didn't do their share of patenting stupid shit, but they did real research, and their parent companies/divisions actually deployed much of their technology in the real world, not just as a licensor.

  3. Xerox vs Xerox PARC by SecondHand · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Show Me This by celticryan · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is an interesting notion. But how can you compare? The curriculum that students have access to these days is far and away better. Access to Advanced Placement classes is increasing. Case in point is the Wisconsin Advanced Placement Distance Education Consortium WAPDEC. The expectations may not be there from teachers, but the individual drive of the "elite" students should make up for that. The access of current students to technology is much greater today (I believe). These elite students have always been outside of pop culture thus that has no effect on them.

    When you are talking about Bell Labs of yester-year, you are talking about some Nobel Laureates. Can you even compare genuis of that level? So... if you think the "go-getters" that made it to the top Labs, such as Bell, back then are your Average Joe that attends public school, you are wrong.

  5. As a Former Bell Labs Employee... by Black-Man · · Score: 2, Informative

    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...

  6. Re:Comparision by bblazz · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's a very limited look at what Google is doing... like their machine translation group scored first at NIST 2005 Machine Translation Evaluation Official Results.

    The MT-05 evaluation consisted of two tasks. Each task required performing translation from a given source language into the target language. The source languages were Arabic and Chinese, and the target language was English.

    And this is probably just a little fraction of their research. Same would probably go for Microsoft Research...

  7. Re:Comparision by Amazing+Quantum+Man · · Score: 2, Informative

    You missed possibly the most significant discovery to come out of Bell Labs (though it's handwaved by with the 6 Nobels), namely the discovery of the 3K Background Radiation.

    --
    Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
  8. Not completely true by warrior_s · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.