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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
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."
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.