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."

Comments

Hardly compare

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hardly compare

[poot_rootbeer]

Google Maps/Earth is cool, but how does it compare to shaping everyones lives like color tv and the transistor.

Too early to tell. Let's check back in 40 years.

and then come the lawyers

[Speare]

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?

Ah, now those were the days ...

[krygny]

... 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."

I really miss school. Now, all anybody wants is results.

Then versus now.

[MaWeiTao]

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.

$7 Billion of R&D @ Microsoft Laboratory

[reporter]

No discussion of AT&T Labs is complete without a reference to Microsoft Labs.

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.

Re:$7 Billion of R&D @ Microsoft Laboratory

[Cirvam]

But what do they make? I mean Bell Labs created things in a ton of different fields and studied just about everything. I have seen some of the computer research and development that comes out of Microsoft Labs and its definatly good, but do they do anything else? It doesn't seem like they are producing the same widespread developments that Bell Labs was involved in.

But here's the worrying part

[Moraelin]

Look at every generation and its parent generation. In every generation, most of the people in it are mundane Joes. Scientific superheroes can come from any background; it is up to the individual to decide what he will do with his life.

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.

Re:Independence Day!

[colmore]

American Capitalism:

step 1) liberals create federal regulatory agency, with mixed results.

step 2) "anti - big government" conservatives are elected.

step 3) said conservatives never actually trim the government, but merely underfund agencies create deficit and appoint people who do not believe in the agencies mission to head them. vast corruption occurs.

step 4) agencies stop regulating and start brokering favors.

step 5) bill clinton reduces size of federal government, but not nearly enough.

step 6) agencies continue to broker favors, appropriations bills divide pork among many industries in many states. these industries are now dominated by a few giant players, now dependent upon those agencies to keep their oligopolies federally enforced. agencies and broken regulations are now politically invincible since they were originally democratic causes, but now support industries purchasing the votes of republicans (and to a lesser but ever-increasing extent, democrats)

step 7) voters somehow continue to think that welfare is the largest violation of free market principles going, never call representatives to task on the issue.

step 8) innovation moves overseas to avoid competing with government supported change-phobic dinosaurs.

step 9) districts are redrawn to insure 97% re-election rate in the house.

wheeee! we're selling our future down the river!

Only IBM remains

[Marcos Eliziario]

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.