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

Show Me This

[triskaidekaphile]

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.

where's the tech?

[free space]

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 :)

Re:AT&T Labs?

[Brickwall]

Bell Labs did enormous technical work in hardware and software - where did Unix start, after all?

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?