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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.
when the next laser, the next solid state transistor, is invented, it will be done in China and India
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html There is the article
Fundamental physics research, while wonderful, does seem a bit much of a company which no longer has a monopoly to tax Americans to fund stuff like that.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
of the "all that matters is the next quarter" school of thought? Between that and over the top IP laws, North America is headed for trouble.
I think I speak for many when I say...
Well FUCK!
So what if it's not immediately marketable. The goodwill alone is worth some investment.
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
"will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software."
If they truly wanted to focus on these areas, and the future of these areas, they would continue the research. Bell/Lucent would not be where they are today without those now basic, but groundbreaking at the time discoveries that they've made in the past.
This seems very shortsighted of them, which unfortunately seems to be the new American way.
With no basic materials science or semiconductor research, I'm not sure what they're going to be able to develop in the fields of "high-speed electronics" or "nanotechnology". Perhaps they're going to restructure so that the existing basic science researchers are more "product driven", being put into marketable research areas with specific goals, but that strikes me as a sure-fire way of duplicating effort and limiting their scope for innovation.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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?
Fundamental physics research has really taken on a life of its own, and is conducted with really big, really expensive toys.
I don't think Lucent now (or even Bell back in the day) could really justify building something like the Large Hadron Collider.
So, yes, a lot of good work was done, but perhaps they've gone as far as they can within the constraints of what's reasonable for them to do as an entity.
And hey, if the best and brightest minds on their payroll instead work on something that makes my connection faster, it's not like I'm gonna complain.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I once worked there. Man that place has gone to the dogs. "Less learnin, more earnin!" -Alcatel-Lucent CEO
It's beginning to look more Rome's last century; Emperors being crowned amidst the decay of the once-great city, old monoliths being torn down to make new ones, because the coin had been so devalued that no one could afford to pay artisans of any skill.
Little by little the American Empire erodes, its more distant conquests taxing it more and more, its currency faltering, more of its talent having to be imported.
I'm looking the Democratic National Convention and its soon-to-come Republican counterpart, and I can't help but thinking that they are indeed fiddling while Rome burns.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Maybe someone's been hob-nobbing with GE? Core business! Core Business! Eliminate waste! Exterminate!
Stick Men
I can't complain about the selling out, because it is hard see putting money into research, that may or may not be profitable in 40 years. I'm sure they put plenty of money into things that are pretty much useless all in the name of research. It doesn't seem that bad to me, they are focusing on nano tech, that has alot to do with physics. I'm sure that just as many breaktroughs are still going to come out of that place in the coming years, probably more practical ones too.
"After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and"
This was all technology appropriated from the Roswell Crash anyhow.
Here's this old myth being repeated once more.
Sorry, Bell Labs never invented the transistor. The transistor had been invented (and patented) back in the 1920's. It was in use during WWII (see "A Different Kind of War" by Commodore Myles).
What Bell Labs DID invent was the SILICON transistor. And of course this was an incredible breakthrough.
Unfortunately, they also have tried claiming complete credit for the creation of the transistor in general, by propagating the myth that no transistors existed before the invention of the Silicon Transistor.
Please get your facts right, as it's a discredit to the people who did the original pioneering work in this field. Thanks.
Welcome to modern western culture... it's all about making a quick buck.
Modern? At what point wasn't it like that?
Any and every company out there is all about making as much money as possible as quickly as possible... what ever happend to making a modest amount of money while actually taking risks?
You can do that with your own money. Making as much money as possible as quickly as possible is pretty much the point of capitalism, where you're using other people's money.
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china or india aren't doing basic research either, i was merely making an appeal to nationalism
why do nations invest billions in space programs? its nothing but tribal chest thumping. now you can complain that nations should invest in space programs and basic research for noble goals, or you can swallow your high-mindedness and appeal to what gets you cash. appeal to tribal pride, and you will squeeze some coin out for basic research
scare americans with stories about chinese and indian basic research. forget the truth or distruth or mistruth or truthiness of those stories. just make an appeal to nationalism. in this way, you will get american funding for basic research
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Who of course had absolutely nothing to do with the original invention of the transistor. Which of course was what this thread was about (and not the Solid State transistor).
Looking for cheap karma via thread hijacking, are we?
Luckily governments across the world have realized the need for basic research. They have provided universities and other public research institutions with practically unlimited funds, without making demands that the research must lead to products or patents.
Due to these happy circumstances, there is no longer a need for the private sector to do basic research. It can focus on what it does best: Turning theoretical results into practical products.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
In the past, the basic science was led by companies like Bell. They could reason the money they spent with the lack of innovation in the field. Now the basic science is led by universities -- exactly how it is supposed to be. Companies can have their problem worked on by paying a fraction of what they pay to their employees (in academia these people are named either phd student or postdoc). My wife is a postdoc and their projects are funded by the industry. They are trying to solve very theoretical problems. The company couldn't explain spending money on this to their shareholders, but now they can explain it with industry-academia partnership. Academia wins, industry wins. Also, we saw this before when MERL closed part of its research lab. Didn't you notice where most departing researchers go? Yes, academia.
You seem to have taken half of my line out of context, then made the point that I was making in one line. I don't know what to say to that other than to point out "I see what U did thair."
It's a three tier system now. Colleges do all the research, the government funds it, and corporations patent the results.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Pulling out from materials science research AND focus on nanotechnology and high-speed electronics? That's nonsense.
Look at Intel: what keeps them one step ahead from an otherwise very creative company as AMD, (apart from the great team Intel has in Haifa) is huge and continuous investments in materials science. A little bit less electromigration, a bit better control of dielectric coefficients, a few nanometers less here and there - it all adds up.
As a researcher in nanotechnology, I have huge, HUGE respect for my materials science colleagues (as well as physical chemists).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
We are becoming an economy of people selling insurance to each other. We don't make build or invent much of anything anymore. And the few things we are good at the Christian fundamentalists make sure never get done.
While big commercial labs may be dying, basic science is not going to die. Basic science will move to universities with big endowments (see Harvard) that have no profit-motive (apart from their endowment managers).
This result was likely precipitated 20 years ago by the Bayh-Dole Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act , which brought about the ease of commercialization of university inventions and the rise of "tech transfer offices" within such institutions.
This is an opportunity for great American universities (widely regarded around the world as the top in research) to become even stronger. Having basic science tied up in the back rooms of corporate laboratories is no way to go about advancing human scientific progress. As universities move toward making all their professors' research available freely online, this will in fact be quite the boon to basic science (in America and elsewhere). See http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/releases/scholarly_02122008.html
I remember the same thoughts being shared with me in 98. And in 88, and in 78. What people forget is Rome 'fell' for a very, very long time and 'fell' for a number of reasons.
No, this isn't a great development. But there should be some corollary to Godwin's that covers comparing stuff to the "Fall of the Roman Empire".
This goes back to the breakup of the monopoly. Once the higher profits were no longer sustainable combined with the litigious society we live in, sustaining a pure R&D department became unsustainable. If a company can't make money in the middle term, how can it turn a profit in the long term or short terms.
I think Alcatel-Lucent is dead. It is too bad, they should have taken a page from Cisco's book.
Crap! I just kissed my karma good-bye.
If you cannot see the fundamental difference between a vakuum tube (electrostatic principle) and a solid state device (exploiting of the bandgap, the whole new dimension of doting semiconductors), i cannot help you.
One was a neat invention, the other a revolution that opened a huge new field of solid state physics AND a completely turn the world of technology upside down...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Why is this tagged USA? Alcatel-Lucent is a French company.
That is a very pretty concept, but it has some very severe issues.
1. Business schools teach that individual companies rarely benefit from the fundamental research they undertake. Fundamental research takes too long; company business goals and external economic pressures change much faster than the to-market time of fundamental R&D. It worked for the old AT&T because their position as a regulated monopoly let them plan much further into the future and assured a rate of return.
2. Companies that undertake R&D programs often apply a discounted cash flow analysis which values the R&D only as it applies to the company's bottom line, discounted by some interest rate. None of this places ANY value to other uses of the technology.
3. Companies dance to the beat of the quarterly report and the business cycle. Guess what gets cut first when the CEO's job / bonus is on the line. I'd bet that the recession on Europe is exactly the reason these programs are being cut.
Any reasonable economic theory takes into account externalities and game theory ideas like the prisoner's dilemma. To me this is where Libertarianism has some work to do.
AFAIK, china is the only civilization that hand endured for thousands of years without major interruptions. maybe US could learn something from them before this current decadence proccess becomes irreversible.
While it may be true that China has done relatively well (I'm a computer engineer, so I'm taking that statement at face value) for that long, I don't think that exploiting the crap out of our population while ignoring long-term effects of our actions is a good path to go down...
Which is... how? What magic tricks should the US perform that will encourage businesses to invest large funds in long-term science that may or may not have any payoff, short-term or long? How is taking one's hands off the market going to encourage such work when market forces explicitly work against such efforts (as this very story demonstrates).
Who said the market wants to invest in the long-term science? Maybe the new landscape of freer markets will promote more competition among companies to produce technological achievements quicker, in order to get a leg up on their competitors. Long-term science might fade away, but that isn't to say an increase in short term research cannot accelerate the development of whatever field they are researching in. There is more than one way to skin a cat.
No, it would not, because a business is interested in optimizing short- to medium-term profits, as you say by creating "marketable products/services", which rules out long-term fundamental science. But no libertarian will admit to that, as you yourself demonstrate.
Umm... only publicly traded companies have those demands on them. Private companies can execute their strategies as they see fit, no matter how ill-fated their decisions may be.
We're talking about fundamental research, here, not donating to your local pet shelter. If you can't see the difference, there's little point in continuing this discussion.
In your opinion, this is fundamental research. With such an opinion, you would be someone who donated to research labs that did research in what you determine to be fundamental research. Other people will think different things, and they can give to those causes. You see how that works? Your opinion is not the same as mine, but you seem to think it is fine to impose your opinions upon all, through government in this case; whereas I think everyone has a right to their opinion no matter what I think and I have no right to tell them what they can or cannot do with their money, especially in the context of charity.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Making as much money as possible as quickly as possible is pretty much the point of capitalism No.
Sorry: yes. If you take my money (capital) in order to make money with it, I want you to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. If not, I will give it to someone else. Scale that notion up and you have explained the capital markets.
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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.
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.
Of course, if they lose a lot of money quickly, they'll be even *less* likely to open it back up. Fundamental research is incompatible with the short-term thinking that the current stock market rewards.
Sadly, I think that this is goodbye.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -- George Bernard Shaw
"The only thing sadder than a young cynic, is an old optimist." -- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemmens)
There is a fundamental difference, vacuum tubes are voltage controlled devices whereas transistors are current controlled.
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 can't complain about the selling out, because it is hard see putting money into research, that may or may not be profitable in 40 years.
Which is why Japan, who started 40 years ago, is so far ahead of us all now.
It starts by force-training infant potential physicists into using their imagination by encouraging them to dream of technical wonders, then encouraging them to believe that learning is wonderful, then giving them wonderful educational environments. The result is a world of wonders.
Ah well, I'm too old for this. At least I have Megatokyo and WoW to console me.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Can modern Italians read poets like Virgil or Horace in the original Latin? Not without extensive, specialized education. Whereas any modern Chinese with basic literacy can read and understand the Book of Songs, which contains poetry from periods even earlier than the Qin.
I would argue that decisions like this are to a large extent the result of a way of thinking specifically associated with business schools and their MBA graduates. It is a type of thinking that looks at the operations of businesses through the lens of a limited set of parameters, as if these parameters can be a substitute for concrete knowledge of the nuts and bolts details of a company's operations. MBA thinking causes managers to close their minds, to limit their decisions to what is immediately measurable and graphable. Extreme adherents to this way of thinking often fail to see the big picture in their business and in the economy.
The best example of this that I can think of occurred during the Mad Cow crisis in the UK a few years ago. In the lead-up to that crisis, MBA manager types were loathe to listen to the warning signs about growing incidents of BSE found in British cattle. They didn't want to act because they feared it would have a drastic impact on their bottom line profits. Although they clearly saw the huge costs of pre-emptive action to deal with the disease, what they failed to see were the costs of inaction. They didn't understand that their inaction would lead to the destruction of the entire British cattle stock. They failed to see that the British meat industry would remain a pariah for many years to come. They failed to balance the huge cost of acting pre-emptively with the destruction of their entire industry as a result of inaction.
Another example occurred when Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard changed that corporation from one of the most creative companies in the world to a commondity PC maker, whose main contribution to the economy is in marketing and distribution. More recently, Maple Leaf foods of Canada has had to institute a massive meat recall, due to Listeria contamination. The contamination was due to its nickel and diming of its quality assurance and sanitation departments. This recall, and the ensuing lawsuits could result in the destruction of the company. All caused because bean counters wanted to save a few dollars on bacterial testing and cleaning.
I am saying what I am because I genuinely believe it. I believe that the people running most of our corporations have little sense of history, of culture, and little sense of what actually makes our economy work. I once had a conversation with an MBA type in which he argued that food was not economically important because it only made up 3% of the Gross Domestic Product. I'd like to see what would happen if he reduced his food budget to zero.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
The problem is that we're quickly losing the ability to think and act for ourselves. Britain is a perfect picture of what happens when you follow that road. A lot of British I talk to simply can't comprehend why you ought to carry a gun, pay for your own healthcare, or prefer terrorists over big brother. We don't seem to realize that our freedoms are being eroded by a pressure-washer congress. Just yesterday there was that Slashdot article about wind power advocating that the Feds mandate/fund a new electrical grid. Uncle Sam is already worse than broke. Quit aggravating the problem.
I was listening to an old Ronald Reagan broadcast the other day, and he talked about how Social Security initially promised that you'd never pay more than $.03 on the dollar. What a laugh. Social Security is looking to pay out trillions more than it has in coming years, and guess who will pay the bill? You'd make more money if your put your retirement into a savings account than into Social Security.
Also, the FDIC is slowly but surely ruining our financial economy. Why do you think lenders gave out so many subprime loans? Because the owners know that whatever happens, they are personally immune. Why do people no longer care to ensure that the S&L's they put their money in are financially sound? Because they know that they are immune, all this thanks to the FDIC, which Congress paid $166 billion to bail out in '89. Folks, there is no such thing as free lunch. Unless we can get the government to quit fiddling with the economy and loosen the grip of the environmentalists on the energy resources we already posses within out borders, we are going to continue to fall.
You'd think that after 200 years we'd get the idea; the best market is a market left alone. It actually works. We didn't get where we are by relying on Uncle Sam to bail us out of everything. Look at a chart of per cent deviation in business activity. Things go up and down and up and down, and then there is a sudden boom in 1928. By the end of 1929 deviation is negative, and by '32 it's almost -50%. Then it rises steadily until '38, when it falls nearly as low as it did in '32. We recovered from the depression in spite of the New Deal, not because of it.
Now Congress is looking to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, simply because they control half of America's mortgages (~$10 trillion) . No company is "too big" to let fail. If we continue to reward financial irresponsibility, it will only get worse in the future. True, it wouldn't be pretty if something that huge fell flat, but postponing it will only make the future worse.
It's high time we quit turning to Congress to solve our problems. We need real, long-term solutions to problems. Our children should not have to reap the fruits of our irresponsibility.
The government can't save you.
also, running a division renowned for state-of-the-art research attracts top talent to your company, which in turn attracts more talent and creates a fertile research atmosphere. then all you need is to actually take advantage of this pool of talent you have at your disposal. don't be like Xerox and spend all this money on research and then let another company steal the results and bring it to market first.
Ambrose Fleming (English) patented the thermionic valve in the UK in 1904 and in the US in 1905. This was a two electrode device (anode and cathode) which acted as a rectifier/detector, i.e. a diode. It was called a thermionic valve as it was analogous to a standard valve, e.g. in a water pipe. It only allowed current flow in one direction. In 1908, Lee De Forest (American) invented the triode, which was a three electrode device (this has a grid in addition to cathode and anode). This is analogous to the transistor, not Fleming's diode valve. A charge on the grid varies the electron flow between cathode and anode. This enables amplification. In the UK, what (was) known as a thermionic valve (or valve) is what is called in the US a vacuum tube. But as with everything else, the old British terms are dying out, and you often hear them called tubes, e.g. "tube radios" here as well. Much to my disgust :)
We also used to call :
Aerial = antenna
Earth = ground
I collect and restore pre-WWII valve radios! (pre WWII a condensor = capacitor).
It isn't the business schools, it's the people. Good MBA programs focus on improving the value of a business, both long and short term, which requires nuts-and-bolts knowledge. Unfortunately, the most self-centered folks in the USA (or greater, for all I know,) figure a business education will show them how to use the capitalist system to their advantage, working toward doing whatever is needed to stroke their egos, including writing a resume that inflates their "paper-route" to "managing district distribution and revenue collection functions for a citywide printing enterprise." The board or powers-that-be of their prospective employer are often too busy to see past the smoke, or are too limited in thought to look outside of their limited search, and end up employing the great, lying, salesman as a manager in a position needing critical thought rather than the extremely qualified candidate who is very slightly outside of their nanoradian focus. I've seen similar thinking in many HR departments - someone with no direct experience but lots of otherwise stellar relevant experience is passed over in favor of someone who had years of lackluster experience.
Back to the Executive cycle - Once the egotistical, lying, salesman has his position, the folks with MBAs who adhere to principles such as long-term-profitability, accounting standards and procedures, risk management, and sustainability are shown the door, since unexpected large short term profits get a bigger ego boost to the egotistical lying salesman than sustained long-term above-sector-average performance. Thus, long term profitability is traded for short term results, and the lying, egotistical salesmem get bonuses and severance packages.
This cycle is self-perpetuating, since the egotistical, lying, salesman hires (or is hired by) folks with similar personality attributes, even though they may be unqualified for the position, so that there is mutual support of their incompetent decisions. After these folks wring all of the short term profit out of a particular business, and everyone realizes what happened, they resign, and move on to looking for the next job, with a resume bullet of "increased profitability XX% in X quarters", which others who are too lazy to research will find impressive, and then hire to run their business (in to the ground), restarting the cycle.
Not that I have personally seen it, or anything like that...
I think this is the wrong take on this story. Bell is getting rid of its Labs because telephones are a solved problem. The people doing basic materials research are the people whose business it is actually relevant to today: Intel and IBM and CNSE.
I work for an R&D department. Nothing we're working is even remotely advanced, just ways of rehashing the same old crap...
That's because R&D departments are, in most cases, more about D than about R.
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
I used to work there, pretty safe to say the business side hates the research side (sometimes with good reason, sometimes not). I would not anticipate their return even if economics changed.
Kind of like taking lunch money away. Without getting in trouble by explaining the funding model (which may have changed), let's just say it wasn't always working out for both parties involved. The hate went both ways too.
If you were a researcher and had a business funded project, you had to stop research and be a developer full time until the project was ready. This meant you were expected to be on a typically tight development schedule, leaving no time for papers, conferences, new research etc. You had to basically be an engineer for a year or two. I guess I didn't understand their pain, but they agreed with each other it is torture.
On the other hand, the business side (which weren't all or significantly MBAs, most were EEs/CSs) had the usual deadlines/deliverables/initiatives/targets/metrics model. We scoff at such trivialities! For them it's very real, I did not understand myself until I came to my present employer in a pure development role. People are fired over these things, but I remember us talking over the water cooler about the business "nonsense" and "small minds". It is how we might laugh at women in the middle east wearing head to toe clothing in the heat, but they get their heads chopped off if they don't...it's just an impedance mismatch.
Further, if you were in BL in a roughly business aligned area, all was not well. Any new product idea which even sounded like it might somehow compete with an existing product was squashed. You had to get external funding, work within your pathetically small internal budget, or basically submarine it and take it out of the company. This happened a lot, there were a few groups who were very disloyal to the company and just using it for a salary in between start-ups, the old-boy network ensured they'd land on their feet.
At least when I left the situation was dire. The research side didn't want to get picked up on a project, and the business side didn't really want to waste time on new development and would rather wait and see, and buy successful companies (either to get their product, or to squish their product). Unfortunately since telecom is so driven by monopolies, there isn't the push to innovate, in fact the contrary. Why make something new, when you can keep selling something old? I personally believe DSL only happened because of the telecom act of '96 forced access provision. Once that went away (or was otherwise nerfed), almost as the first act of the Dubya administration...new projects stopped overnight. Lights out.
So even if they suddenly got billions of dollars, I don't see them embracing research again. They'd just sit on it and use it strategically, waiting for products they want/need to emerge on their own.