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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."
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$k8 tH!$
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.
It was still good in the early 80's.
But as soon as the AT&T break up occured, all the money
were redirected to applied research.
Too bad. Had the BEST corporate library I've ever seen.
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?
Jonah HEX
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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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Bell Labs
-Information Theory
-LEDs
-C/C++
-UNIX
-WLAN
-6 Nobel Prizes
Google Labs
-PageRank
-AJAX Mail Client
-Contextual Advertising
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
But one other little known area they did work in was, of all things, economics. The Bell System Journal of Economics contained many ground-breaking papers on the structure, regulation, and pricing of utilities. One classic paper by Richard Posner in 1975 introduced the "capture theory of regulation". He wrote that when an industry is supposed to be regulated by the "public", which is represented by some board or trustees, the industry has an intense and concentrated desire to get the board to see things its way, while the public's desire to (say) have lower prices is more diffuse. In addition, the industry will have the technical and legal experts (and the cash to pay them), while the public depends on volunteers and/or screaming harpies with axes to grind to make their case. The inevitable result, he wrote, is the board becomes "captured" by the industry, and basically does what the industry wants.
Explains a lot, don't you think?
What was once true, is no longer so
The prototypical "Two Guys in a Garage" were Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in 1939 who founded one of the top "blue sky" research labs HP Labs.
i.e. the two guys in the garage predated the cold war and founded "blue sky" research labs, as did previous inventors coming from modest origins (Bell, Chester Carlson of XEROX, Edwin Land of Polaroid). Inventors create labs, Managers kill them.
Lucent was doing extremely well until the end of the decade, at which point a combination of less-than-competent (and from what I remember hearing, somewhat corrupt) management
Which is a long-winded way of saying "Carly Fiorina".
Most people forget that she brought down Lucent before she destroyed HP.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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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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.
wise, experienced adults created the labs...
Instant gratification and shortsighted children killed them.
This whole culture of kids running the world is irresponsible and devastating. They look back and say "See how horrible the big corporations and monopolies were. See how much damage they were doing, taking their time to deveop and test... ponder and pursue." We are forgoing the wisdom of experience and age, to satisfy a world ruled by pop culture.
We may or may not have developed our current level of technology if we had stayed within that model used during the cold war. But I guarantee we would have a lot more security in our daily lives.
...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.