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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
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.
"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'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?
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.
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.
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.
humorous, considering the precursor to Six Sigma was actually developed at Bell Labs...
from Wikipedia:
In 1924, Bells Labs physicist Dr. Walter A. Shewhart proposed the control chart as a method to determine when a process was in a state of statistical control. Shewart's methods were the basis for statistical process control (SPC) - the use of statistically-based tools and techniques for the management and improvement of processes. This was the origin of the modern quality movement, including Six Sigma.
To err is human, to really foul up requires a computer
Why is this tagged USA? Alcatel-Lucent is a French company.
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 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)