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Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Wired: "After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the end of the road for Bell Labs' fundamental physics research lab. Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software." Jamie points out this list of Bell Labs' accomplishments at Wikipedia, including little things like the UNIX operating system.
That America has been losing its edge for years and every time you look around, the problem is accelerating? Do new research labs not get any press? Or is it really the case that more and more corporate research labs are being shut.
I know American Universities are still considered tops, but how much longer will that even matter?
Roughly half my comments are never submitted. You may be reading the better half...
That's sad.
I've seen so many of the big labs die. I happened to be at IBM Alamaden the day IBM exited the disk drive business, a sad day and the beginning of the end for Alamaden. I saw Xerox PARC in its heyday; I've used and programmed an original Alto. DEC's labs are long gone, killed in the Compaq/HP takeover. HP Labs is a shadow of its former self.
Who in American industry is still doing basic research?
You can't convince me that the transistor didn't make them a lot more money than they put in when you look at the big picture. I'm willing to belive that on paper, Bell labs may have been a loss, but of course that's not the same as the division being dead weight. I'd be suprised if this decision wasn't based entirely off of myopic buisness decisions. Want to raise your stock? Maybe if you fire everyone and cut costs to zero, your investors will be pleased.
I of course don't know the inside story, but sounds stupid enough. If this is the case, here's hoping Alcatel-Lucent loses a lot of money quickly and opens it back up.
when the next laser, the next solid state transistor, is invented, it will be done in China and India
*ahem* What about the "such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology" part?
IMO nanotechnology is today's "basic science research".
Why, are China and India doing basic science research? My impression that pretty much *everyone* is getting out of the game. Deregulating telecom and breaking up AT&T did wonders for telephone customers, but it did not do good things for smart people with big budgets. Consider the fact that UNIX started as an excuse to hack on computer games.
My old advisor has been spending a lot of time in China and India lately. In his eyes, India really is moving in the direction of major fundamental research. China...not so much. He thinks that if things move at their current pace, there will be a crossover in about 20-30 years when India passes America in innovation. America's technical lead is still quite pronounced today, but not remotely secure.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I disagree. Breaking up the service monopolies (like the Bell System) enabled greedy companies to skim cream from centers of high profit (like businesses and dense urban areas) at the expense of residential and rural customers.
Your examples of innovation are weak. Bell Labs invented AMPS, an early cell phone system, and did lots of cell communication research before that. They did scads of other basic research too. Choice of phone providers and buying your phone aren't great innovation.
I'm not saying that the Bell System monopoly was good or bad, but its monopoly position enabled it to finance true research and innovation. Today's competitive commerce does not allow that kind of research and innovation at all - any "research" investment is in applied research, and is all about short term profits.
One Bell System, it worked.
-trb (at BTL 1978-83)
I live in this small town, at the top of the hill is a large edifice to modern technology. The town's zipcode is immortalised in "The C Programming Language" book. K&R both used to be seen in the local Friendly's.
Things are different now, though. The huge carparks have been empty for years, some of the multiple entrances are often closed on workdays. I have been in the buildings and they smell of history, but sadly they don't smell of the future. This story is simply the black filling in the final period in a long story. The fact is the place has done little of it's famous research in more than a decade. It's an empty shell of a place. C was created there, Unix too, even C++. Many local businesses have failed or moved out as the Labs have withered away. The gist of this story is long overdue.
Why appeal to such an ugly thing? Why not appeal to humanity? Do you really, honestly and sincerely believe that all Americans just run around saying "we're the best!" and have some primitive need to "be the best!"?
I know its "in fashion" to hate America and stereo type Americans as club wielding hate machines that dont do anything except for "profit" or "oil", but a lot of American innovention came from "foreigners" who came to our country to ink out a life that the failed social states of Europe simply couldnt/wouldnt provide.
I know this is going to get modded troll (because I am posting after 6pm, aka: non-Us slashdot time), but the United States will continue to remain the research and technology leader tommorow for the same reason it has been for the past 100 years: The United States is more welcoming to foreigners.
You may think I kid, but Germans hate the Turks and the Poles (and other Eastern immigrants), Switzerland has one of the highest bars to entry for immigrants (save refugees, but thats a different crowd), and the same goes for most Socialist nations. Many European nations have elected political parties into power that are very, very outwardly anti-immigrant / pro-nationalist.
Regardless of what the media portrays, the United States is still the most welcoming country to immigrants who want to make a better life. Regardless if they stay and become American citizens, or go back to their home countries (where they can help to make a better life for their families), this is only possible because of US capitalism, and being a non socialism.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Now the Roman Empire was enormously successful. Despite its grotesque taste in sports, its often appalling system of government, and its slave economy, it lasted for many centuries, and the lands of the empire enjoyed stability and prosperity year after year after year. They weren't plunderers, like so many barbarian kings who seized a land only to loot its wealth; they invested in what they conquered. Aqueducts. Sanitation. Roads. Irrigation. Medicine. Education. Wine. Baths. They knew how to keep order, and on the whole they brought peace.
Were America successfully to mimic Rome, it might do good for much of the world. But from a practical perspective, there are few places left an imperialist can go without running up against the interests of a nuclear-armed rival. Imperialism today would be a dangerous business. So a tyrant America would not occupy lands like the Romans; they'd build a merchant empire like the British. Already the basics are in place: airbases dotted around the world, battlegroups at sea each with more firepower than most nations. The Empire would not require a vast bureaucracy, nor legions occupying each and every city; all that would be needed would be a tremendous mobility, and the threat to all nations that if they disobey, they'll be destroyed. Fear would keep them in line. America cannot do this at present, for all the world knows they have enough on their hands just in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a tyrant could simply bring in conscription, build more carriers, more planes, more bombs...
Alas, however, this empire would not be one of investment. When your rule is based not on legions on the ground, nor on merchants in port, but on the threat of annihilation, why would you share the wealth? So this would be no Roman empire at all; just another barbarian plunderer.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Having worked at Bell Labs, Holmdel back in the '80s, not only does the shutting down of basic research at the 'Labs sadden me, but Lucent dumping that beautiful Eero Saarinen designed building in Holmdel and allowing it to be torn down really bothers me..
Holmdel was magnificent. Seeing pictures of it's last days, with the atrium forest dying, the building getting into horrible shape, and the places I was so familiar with turning to rubble actually affects me emotionally.
With the final shut down of basic research at the Labs we are finally seeing the true results of the break-up of the old Bell System 01JAN1984 by Judge Greene. There are no companies left with the income and drive to support good, large scale basic research in the United States. It was more than just Ma Bell who died that day.
--Tomas
That, and, IIRC a federal law that obliged it to finance research with 50% of its profits in exchange for the monopoly.
As I recall it wasn't a requirement that they do research. It was permission to include the cost of research related to telephony in their cost of doing business - on which they got to set monopoly phone rates so they got a specified rate of return (6% if I recall correctly).
The result was that the more money they spent on research, the more profit they made.
So they set up Bell Labs to spend as much money as possible, on anything even vaguely related to telephony.
And it "was an abysmal failure". From year one they made more money on the results of the work (by things like licensing patents) than it cost to run the labs. So basic research was profitable all by itself. B-)
But this counterintuitive effect also has a counterintuitive downside. The rewards for a research project start once it's done and keep coming in for quite a while after it's finished. Most of us would consider this good. But the Harvard Business School approach to management comes into play: The incentive structure on managers is to show as big a profit as possible for a few years and move on, thus looking better than your predecessors and successors and getting progressively better paying positions. So by killing the CURRENT research and just collecting on the results of the previous work they can cut their costs to near nothing while the benefits keep rolling in. For a while. Then they move on. Without new work the revenue gradually dries up and their successors take the rap. (And their successors would have to increase costs while the income was ramping down, which would look even worse, to turn things around.)
Regardless:
Without the guaranteed profit they're in the same boat as every other large cashflow company in the world. Perhaps basic research would continue to be profitable beyond the dreams of avarice. But there are other profitable things to do with the money where the return is more visible in advance, rather than crapshooting on what basic research might come up with. So (like all those other companies), the new generation of management reacts to the new situation by doing the standard thing - which doesn't include basic research.
(And it doesn't help that they already went through the "cut expenses and look good on the return on old work" phase a few years back. IMHO this is the house of cards coming down.)
= = = =
As I understand it, Xerox PARC had something similar going on but for a different reason: a strange accounting system.
One of the first things PARC did was to design a "new control panel" (and brain) for Xerox copiers. This replaced a bunch of relay logic with a microcomputer/early logic chips. And that saved a LOT of money.
PARC got credited with that savings on all the copier products sold from then on (and with similar stuff it did later). So it could spend money hand-over-fist on whatever it wanted and still look profitable.
(This was the same accounting department that, if I've got THIS right, screwed up big time when Xerox went into the mainframe business as the first company to take on IBM's core business, 'way back in the early days of "foreign attachments" opening up the IBM big-iron market. They built a CPU. After a while they decided that they were in the red on it big time, folded the division, and sued IBM on antitrust. In those days equipment was all leased. As a result of the suit IBM got hold of their accounting info and discovered the hadn't really understood how to interpret lease income. They were actually VERY profitable, and had folded the division because of this accounting screwup. Of course this discovery folded the suit.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm not saying that the Bell System monopoly was good or bad
Well, I'll say it. It was bad.
You had to rent phones from Ma Bell. We had 3 phones in our house and had to pay a rental fee each month for each of them. You couldn't buy their phones, and you weren't allowed to attach phones from any other company. All you were allowed to do was rent theirs.
Ma Bell abused her customers horrible. Yes, the vast profits allowed them to do research at bell labs that turned out some neat things, but that didn't make up for the fact that they were abusing their monopoly power horribly.
Well, you think the people in charge are shortsighted. I think many of them are actually fairly smart; they are simply optimizing for a different metric than you or I would like. All that counts to them is a the next quarter or two. If the stock does well in that time frame, they just cash in and move it to other investments. Their jobs are similarly mobile.
In short, the problem is that there is no long term accountability for management, and hence they have no interest in optimizing for the long term survival of a company.
As another poster pointed out, not all MBA's are created equal. In fact part of MBA programs is to teach students to look at the big picture, and give examples of how "additional costs" for things like quality, supply chain management, and research actually save money. I'm sure many people on slashdot know lazy or unintelligent engineers/programming/IT hacks who become decision makers through politics, or off the hard work of others; those people are not representative of the skills that are taught in the university.
What usually happens is money losing business units are under the gun to prove their value at all times. If a company sees a bunch of quality problems costing them money, they may come to the conclusion that they might as well cut the quality department because not only is it eating money, it's not even working. So they scale back, outsource, or otherwise balance the value of the business unit to the cost.
Specifically looking at research, you may create amazing things, but if the rest of the company can't figure out how to monetize that research it's just dead weight. Depending on the company structure they may be able to change the culture of the company to enable capitalizing on research. Usually, though, in large corporations it won't work the structure is too large and entrenched to change - so cut the dead weight by selling it, spinning it off, or change it's focus to something the company can use.
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All the best minds leave India. This has changed in the last 5 years, but it is still the exception for someone smart to stay back in India.
The schools and colleges in India suck - I once had a professor (meaning, he had completed his Ph.d) who, when stuck with some equation of the form d(...)/dt, cancelled d & d and 'assumed t=1' and solved the equation. This was one of the senior professors.
In school, answers are graded based on how long they are not by what they say. If you think the education in USA is bad ( and I agree that it is), then you should see what happens in India.
The amount of resources America can throw at education is probably equal to a good % of the total GDP of India. I still remember how my friend and I felt when we saw a community college here - a freaking community college was bigger and better equipped than any college we saw in India.
So, anytime someone here talks about India beating the USA in science, I know they're full of BS.