[HN Gopher] What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?
___________________________________________________________________
What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?
Author : nickwritesit
Score : 320 points
Date : 2024-07-18 19:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| csours wrote:
| Crystals! (Tangent, but fun)
|
| Lab Grown Quartz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcu8Lz5PHMw
|
| Alan Holden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp6bN9vN6e4
| retrac wrote:
| It would require Ma Bell. As the article correctly deduces (IMO),
| it was related to their quasi-monopoly. It was a partial and
| insecure monopoly; they did need to innovate or they would
| eventually be eaten. Telecoms was their business, in the very
| broadest sense. New ways of drawing wire more efficiently would
| benefit their bottom line. New forms of amplifier technology
| would almost certainly benefit them ten or twenty years down the
| line. Same with a new kind of treatment to make telephone poles
| last longer. So basic metallurgy, forestry, and cutting-edge
| semiconductor physics were all within the remit. In hindsight
| it's almost like a public/national research laboratory, that
| happened to be privately held.
| foobarian wrote:
| Google or Microsoft are pretty close nowadays. Look at all the
| infrastructure both of these sponsored over the years. It may
| not be as foundational as what BL did, but then again there is
| not as much low hanging fruit today either.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Also Google and Microsoft for the most part are not even
| trying to be innovative. Rather they try to milk out every
| last cent of existing products, driving people to buy their
| cloud services, or directly or indirectly sell user data to
| third parties.
| fragmede wrote:
| self driving cars and transformers not good enough for you?
| beezlewax wrote:
| What self driving cars? None of them are up to the task
| from what I've seen.
| NullHypothesist wrote:
| Waymo's got an open-to-public service in SF & Phoenix.
| Testing in LA & Austin now. It works really well, and has
| been expanding quickly (relatively speaking).
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/travel/self-driving-
| cars-...
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Not when hipsters in my town strand them with a sack of
| flour.
| nox101 wrote:
| You're saying Google's long work in AI, Quantum Computing,
| etc... are not trying to be innovative? Their researchers
| certainly put out a lot of influential papers.
|
| https://research.google/
| abadpoli wrote:
| There is an insane amount of innovation happening at Google
| and Microsoft et al. The amount of investment going into
| efforts like making data centers more power efficient,
| making better cooling systems, reducing latency or using
| fiber more efficiently etc is incredible and rivals the
| work done at Bell Labs back in the day. You just don't hear
| about it because these private companies have no incentive
| to share it.
|
| And that's entirely separate from the fact that Generative
| AI wouldn't even be a thing if not for the research that
| Google published.
| buildbot wrote:
| Literally just watched an internal talk about this topic
| at work (Microsoft). Lots of cool internal research to
| make things better in every domain, but as you said, it
| won't be shared that much.
|
| The Open Compute Project is great though, and MSR does
| awesome research across many domains too, as does
| Alphabet.
| count wrote:
| Was the Bell Labs Systems Journal shared outside of Bell
| Labs contemporaneously? I have original copies of the
| Unix issue, for example, but have no idea if that was
| 'generally available' back when it came out...
| ghaff wrote:
| Without deeply researching the topic, my understanding is
| that Bell Labs didn't really "open source" everything or
| really most things. Just look at the later law suit over
| Unix.
| gregw2 wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix :
|
| "Due to a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an
| antitrust case, the Bell System was forbidden from
| entering any business other than "common carrier
| communications services", and was required to license any
| patents it had upon request. Unix could not, therefore,
| be turned into a product. Bell Labs instead shipped the
| system for the cost of media and shipping.
|
| ...
|
| In 1983, the U.S. Department of Justice settled its
| second antitrust case against AT&T, causing the breakup
| of the Bell System. This relieved AT&T of the 1956
| consent decree that had prevented the company from
| commercializing Unix. AT&T promptly introduced Unix
| System V into the market. The newly created competition
| nearly destroyed the long-term viability of Unix, because
| it stifled the free exchanging of source code and led to
| fragmentation and incompatibility. The GNU Project was
| founded in the same year by Richard Stallman."
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm well aware of the history of Unix. My point was
| simply that Bell Labs was historically not a particularly
| open organization outside of the bounds that they were
| required to be by law.
| esafak wrote:
| https://blog.google/outreach-
| initiatives/environment/deepmin...
| didgetmaster wrote:
| So if Microsoft discovered something very useful (e.g.
| new battery technology, or more efficient air
| conditioning system), but decided that it was something
| they didn't want to develop and market; would they share
| the knowledge or just bury it in case they might want to
| use it someday?
| abadpoli wrote:
| I imagine they would do something like this: https://news
| .microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/datace...
|
| These innovations don't always have to be "marketed" to
| be shared. Things like this get developed and used
| internally, and then sometimes the company likes to brag
| about their accomplishments, even if it's not an
| externally facing product.
| exe34 wrote:
| do you happen to know why the tremendous progress at BL
| was shared (did it take a long time?) whereas the
| progress that happens at today's datacenters are mostly
| secret? I fear that no matter how much progress they
| make, if it's not eventually shared, it'll just be
| lost/wasted and others will have to reinvent it.
| abadpoli wrote:
| My take is that it's related to the parent commenter's
| thoughts on the relative monopoly that Bell had.
|
| If you're a monopoly with no practical competition,
| sharing your accomplishments gets you good will and has
| little downsides. But if you're Microsoft, and one of
| your big moats and competitive advantage is the massive
| fleet of data centers you've been building up over the
| years, you don't want to hurt yourself by giving your
| competition the information they need to build new, more
| efficient data centers.
| xarope wrote:
| There has always been a lot of good research happening in
| MS, but what we see as end-users are Recall, and the
| latest Bing news in Edge. Seriously, who are the PMs that
| allow this cr*p?!?
| pjmlp wrote:
| The ones whose KPIs depend on making it happen.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > not even trying to be innovative
|
| it was Google's research that led to the current LLM
| revolution
| xtracto wrote:
| Someone from The Valley told me a couple (~8) of years ago
| that he didn't like the way SV startup culture had
| transformed. He argued that in the past, the culture of
| startups in the valley focused on innovation and
| disruption. VCs would fund moonshots and small teams doing
| crazy bew thing.
|
| But nowadays, the valley looks more for "scalability'
| projects, things that will sell to millions of people.
|
| He blamed the cost of living/hiring in the area. He
| mentioned that with a lower cost of wages and living. A
| pre-seed startup could go a long way with family money
| funding the moonshot.
|
| I think it's sad that as you said even companies with large
| chunks of money aren't willing to spend in r&d as much as
| before. I guess a war is needed for that unfortunately.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Ma Bell was regulated and they used the labs partly as a
| slush fund to smooth out their apparent earnings. When they
| got a rate increase, the labs would be well funded for a
| while, so AT&T wouldn't have to show an unseemly spike in
| profits. When they went for a long while without an increase,
| the labs would run lean until the next increase came. At
| least that's what someone told me back then.
| tedunangst wrote:
| I've read more than one history of bell labs and never
| heard about this dynamic.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Tax law would also have to change:
| https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-
| cre....
| mullingitover wrote:
| Winner winner chicken dinner.
|
| I think, ironically, the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017" has
| gutted tech jobs and R&D in a profound way.
|
| > The TCJA amended I.R.C. SS174 such that, beginning in 2022,
| firms that invest in R&D are no longer able to currently
| deduct their R&D expenses. Rather, they must amortize their
| costs over five years, starting with the midpoint of the
| taxable year in which the expense is paid or incurred. For
| costs attributable to research conducted outside the U.S.,
| such costs must be amortized over 15 years. This will be the
| first time since 1954 that companies will have to amortize
| their R&D costs, rather than immediately deduct those
| expenses.
|
| The act actually took us back by many decades in terms of R&D
| incentives, and devastated US competitiveness vs China by
| disincentivizing R&D across the board.
| nkozyra wrote:
| Rather than a monopoly, I'd say it takes 2 things (that are
| often present in monopolies):
|
| 1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no
| _immediate_ threat from competition
|
| #2 drives a lot of the desire to innovate, the hope being that
| by the time competition catches up, you've got so much new
| stuff that they're back where they started.
|
| The closest thing I can think of in the tech space now is Apple
| with consumer hardware moat. The other big players are still
| cannibalizing and copying each other's business segments.
| trelane wrote:
| You are forgetting a vital element: the C-suite must want to
| plow the money into research instead of lining their yachts
| and various houses with it.
| bumby wrote:
| Somewhat less cynical view, but maybe corporations were
| allowed to be more long term focused in the past?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Or maybe they had to be, with interest and tax rates what
| they were?
| bumby wrote:
| Could you elaborate or be more specific? Given how long
| BL existed, I'm not sure I can pin down what rates you're
| talking about
| gregw2 wrote:
| One of the commenters on the original article said "Bell
| Labs was funded through a 1% tax on Bell's overall
| revenue, as well as a claim on a portion of Western
| Electric's revenue, so yes, AT&T was able to recoup Bell
| Labs' expenses."
|
| This would protect it from (at least certain types of)
| C-suite predation presumably.
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| AT&T wasn't publicly traded until 1984, so there's a clue
| for you right there
| dogsgobork wrote:
| By 1984 AT&T had been listed on the NYSE for over 80
| years.
| nik_0_0 wrote:
| "The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) was
| listed on the NYSE on Sept. 4, 1901. Only 11 other
| companies have been listed longer than AT&T."
|
| Yeah, impressively wrong gp! 1984 was when they were
| broken up by Justice Department.
| hibikir wrote:
| You don't need to mandate a short term view when the
| executive's massive pay packages depend on stock
| valuations: They will chase the money all by themselves,
| not trying to build a company that might make major
| discoveries eventually
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| It's not like corporate executives have carte blanche to
| make these decisions. They report to the board, who
| represent the shareholders, to whom they have a legal duty
| to maximize profits. The entire construct is set up to
| promote the alternative to building the next Bell Labs.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| They don't have a legal duty to maximize profits, they
| have a legal duty to represent the fiduciary interests of
| the shareholders. If the company doesn't make as much
| profit next quarter but it will be healthier in the long
| run for it, that is perfectly OK.
| ramblerman wrote:
| > 1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no
| immediate threat from competition
|
| You just described google 10 years ago. And I would argue
| they have been on a downhill slop ever since.
|
| So I think its something else, perhaps great leadership at
| the right time. Google certianly had the talent, but pichai
| has been an awful steward.
| runevault wrote:
| Even when you create the conditions there's always some
| luck factor. Whether it is leadership with the right vision
| or the right people in other key roles to create
| innovation. But I feel like the 2 points above are sort of
| the starting point that makes it possible for the other
| things to matter (or more likely, flukes can occur).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Part of the problem, I think, is that Google's relentless
| focus on information is just never to end up being as sexy
| as the stuff Bell Labs worked on over the years.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> So I think its something else_
|
| The government allowed Bell to maintain its monopoly
| position with the understanding that Bell Labs would work
| for the public good. In other words, Bell was unable to
| capitalize on what Bell Labs created. Bell Labs, in
| hindsight, is so significant because everyone else was able
| to take their research and do something with it.
|
| Google has given us things here and there (the LLM craze
| stems from papers published by Google), but it seems most
| of the research they are doing stays within Google. For
| example, I expect you will struggle to find what you need
| to start a self-driving car company based on Waymo's work.
|
| _> Google certianly had the talent_
|
| Including Bell Labs alumni. They used their time to create
| Go. If that isn't game changing, perhaps Bell Labs was also
| a product of its time?
| emchammer wrote:
| It seems like there was something special about the
| innovation derived from collective spirit during that
| time, the 1940-1960s. Post-depression and -war momentum
| combined with major scientific and technology milestones
| that had to be passed, with a dynamic caused by an
| unprecedented global situation.
| randomdata wrote:
| What was most special is that it was new, few were doing
| it, and so any achievements stood out and were able to
| make a splash. Nowadays you can't even step outside in a
| rural area and not bump into someone who is trying to
| make their mark.
|
| We now see more achievements made each year than Bell
| Labs achieved in its entire history, but because of that
| there is no novelty factor anymore. It is now just the
| status quo, which doesn't appeal to the human thirst for
| something new. Mind-blowing discoveries made today are
| met with "meh" as a result.
|
| It's kind of like a long-term relationship. In the
| beginning feelings are heightened and everything feels
| amazing, but as the relationship bonds start to grow
| those feelings start to subdue back down to normal
| levels. Without halting innovation for a time (perhaps a
| long time), to the point that we start to forget, I'm not
| sure there is any way to bring back the warm fuzzies.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Some major drivers of innovation for that time period:
|
| A lot of people were very recently very upskilled on the
| government's dime. A shitload of Navy personnel had just
| been trained on things like electrical engineering to
| better understand the radios and radars they were
| operating, and others were taught how computers worked
| and accidentally turned into early software developers.
|
| Labor was in short supply so companies had to provide
| significant benefits and eventually pay to make their
| business work. Low level labor making more money directly
| enriches a majority of Americans at the time, and a rich
| base like that has more resources to devote to buying
| goods but also investigating WHICH goods are worth it, ie
| making market competition actually work instead of just
| being about who has the lowest sticker price, which is a
| direct result of modern americans being dirt fucking poor
| in money, time, attention, resources, etc. A shortage of
| labor and therefore increase in the wealth of the
| everyman may have also contributed to the renaissance.
|
| The US was still PUMPING money into basic sciences and
| basic technology research. This is especially useful for
| materials science which feeds a lot of engineering.
|
| So many people had been recently put into such high
| positions that there wasn't as much of a "Management
| class", workers were managing workers. People could focus
| on doing things instead of office politics, ass covering,
| and pretending to look busy to people who have no
| freaking clue what they are managing.
|
| Germany lost IP protections for many things. This results
| in a fertile ground for innovation, because everyone can
| freely make a widget that matches the now invalid german
| patent X, so there is high compatibility in widgets,
| while also being high incentive to improve your version
| of Widget X in some way so you can patent that
| improvement, meaning there's a lot of exploration going
| on in the solution space. Patents explicitly freeze
| investment into large solution spaces, especially with
| how vague modern patents are, how incompetent and
| undertrained/understaffed the patent office is, and how
| hard it is to get a court to invalidate bullshit patents.
|
| Basically all those things businesses insist are bad made
| the world better for consumers, and more importantly,
| _people_. State investment into the population paid huge
| dividends. Who could have guessed.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Go is basically Limbo, with a bit of Oberon-2 sprinkled
| on top.
|
| They got more lucky with Go than with either Limbo or
| Oberon-2, thanks to Google moat, Docker pivoting from
| Python to Go, Kubernetes pivoting from Java to Go, both
| projects hiting gold with devops community.
|
| Google itself keeps being a Java and C++ shop for most
| purposes outside Kubernetes.
| randomdata wrote:
| Google not using Go keeps with the Bell tradition of not
| using Bell Labs work, I suppose, but otherwise how does
| that relate?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Bell Labs did use UNIX, C and C++, otherwise we would be
| luckly using safer environments.
| randomdata wrote:
| It doesn't seem that they ever really used Plan 9,
| though. Are you trying to imply that Bell Labs was just
| few trick pony, or what? I'm still not clear on what
| connection your story about Go/Limbo/Oberon-2 has to the
| topic at hand. It seems you forgot to include the
| conclusion?
| pjmlp wrote:
| The Plan 9 guys are UNIX guys.
|
| Punchline is without Google's moat, Go would have gone
| the way of Plan 9 and Inferno.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> The Plan 9 guys are UNIX guys._
|
| Who are also the Go guys, but we already know that as it
| was already talked about much earlier in the thread. If
| you have some reason to return to that discussion, let it
| be known that you have not made yourself clear as to why.
|
| > Punchline is without Google's moat, Go would have gone
| the way of Plan 9 and Inferno.
|
| And that relates to the topic at hand, how? I am happy to
| wait. No need to rush your comments. You can get back to
| us when your conclusion that connects this all back to
| what is being talked about is fully written.
| pjmlp wrote:
| "Including Bell Labs alumni. They used their time to
| create Go. If that isn't game changing, perhaps Bell Labs
| was also a product of its time"
|
| Failed twice to create anything else, only succeeded yet
| again thanks to Google moat and a set of lucky events
| caused by Docker and Kubernetes rewrite in Go, followed
| by their commercial success.
| randomdata wrote:
| Bold claim that Go succeeded. A couple of software
| projects used by a tiny fraction of the population (hell,
| a tiny fraction of the software development population!)
| is of dubious success. Just about anyone's pet language
| can achieve that much. What sees you consider it to be
| more?
|
| Also interesting that you consider UTF-8 to be a failure.
| From my vantage point, that was, by far, the most
| successful thing they created. Nearly the entire world's
| population is making use of that work nowadays. Most
| people can only dream of failing like that.
|
| That conclusion, though... We still have no idea what
| this has to do with the topic at hand. Again, don't let
| me make you feel rushed to get your replies out. I am
| happy to wait until you are complete in writing that.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >You just described google 10 years ago. And I would argue
| they have been on a downhill slop ever since.
|
| Don't forget Microsoft ever since the early 90s or so. And
| I would argue they haven't produced much usable stuff in
| the research realm at all.
|
| So I think it's more than just #1 and #2. There's also a
| #3: a national culture where doing great things is seen as
| more important than simply maximizing shareholder returns.
| The US had that many decades ago when it sent people to the
| Moon, but it lost it sometime after the 1980s.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of these
| giant companies took their trillions of dollars and said
| "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going to be
| pure research now! We're going to turn our offices back
| into a college-campus-like playhouse of innovation! We're
| going to hire the best and brightest again and give them
| amazing things to work on rather than improving click-
| rates by 0.1%! We're going to do _only_ moonshots! We 're
| not going to maximize shareholder value!" The stock price
| would go to $0.01 but it would be a paradise for
| researchers and developers.
|
| It would be such a breath of fresh air from all of the
| dollar-maximizer companies that we seem to be stuck with
| now.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> I 'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of
| these giant companies took their trillions of dollars and
| said "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going
| to be pure research now!_
|
| If this alternate timeline where giant companies are
| autonomous creatures were to be, why would there be
| shareholders?
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| why would they even be companies?
|
| Not sure if true but i read a funny: bezos entire fortune
| could keep the pentagon afloat for 2 whole weeks.
| notjulianjaynes wrote:
| Forbes is saying he's got $211 billion so more like 3
| months if we're comparing to the whole dod budget
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's shares number of shares times current share price,
| not money. If he starts selling those shares they won't
| all sell at that price.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> why would they even be companies?_
|
| Because that's what was asserted to be in this alternate
| timeline. An alternate-alternate timeline could have no
| companies, sure, but the discussion is centred around a
| specific alternate timeline.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Maybe the companies could be run by LLMs. They will still
| need shareholders because, well, as far as I know at
| least computers can't own property yet.
| randomdata wrote:
| An alternate-alternate timeline might have companies run
| by LLMs, but the alternate timeline under discussion
| states that the giant companies act on their own accord,
| with their own dollars - which, again, questions where
| the shareholders fit.
| toast0 wrote:
| I don't think that works either.
|
| You need a playhouse of innovation, but you also need a
| pipeline of taking that innovation and making lots of
| money/practical applications. And you need the
| interaction between people doing practical work and
| feeling limitations and the playhouse trying stuff out.
|
| Bell Labs worked because AT&T had huge field operations,
| a huge automation problem (telephone switching and
| billing), and a huge manufacturing arm for telco
| equipment and customer equipment, and a reputation for
| solving problems related to communication. Small
| innovations easily contributed to the bottom line, and
| large innovations enabled massive expansion of
| communication. Also, there's a huge benefit from research
| being connected to scale --- Bell labs innovations were
| likely to be applied in AT&Ts businesses quickly which
| informs future innovation; if you're an unconnected
| playhouse of ideas, it's hard to know if your innovations
| can be applied.
|
| For better or worse, things are less integrated now.
| Telcos still have large field operations, but they don't
| usually manufacture the equipment. Automation of
| telephone switching is so complete, I don't know if there
| are any operators anymore. Billing for usage is very
| limited.
|
| You see some companies developing the processors in
| equipment they use and sell, which is more integrated
| than when it was all Intel/AMD/Qualcomm.
| JackFr wrote:
| There seems to be some amnesia about the sort of company
| AT&T was. AT&T was first and foremost a profit maximizer.
| They were the poster child for abusive monopolies.
| Remember until the 1980s, literally no one owned a phone.
| All hardware that connected to a phone line was owned by
| ATT.
| mdorazio wrote:
| As much as I dislike Elon these days, this is basically
| how all his recent companies have been setup. Tesla,
| SpaceX, Neuralink, and arguably even Boring are all
| moonshots, the latter 3 being so anti-shareholder that
| they aren't even publicly traded.
| _visgean wrote:
| He might be anti shareholder but that does not mean he is
| pro worker. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-
| reportedly-terrifi...
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Why would being anti-shareholder make someone pro-worker?
| jorvi wrote:
| There is nothing special about Elon choosing to do that,
| it isn't some contrarian masterstroke.
|
| Of Arianaspace, Blue Origin, Rocketlab, SpaceX, United
| Launch Alliance: only Rocketlab is publicly traded.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Google more or less _did_ do this. Why do you think they
| created Alphabet? To house all of their experimental
| moonshot companies.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I thought it was for regulatory shielding
| robertlagrant wrote:
| And then...the company goes bust? Why would anyone do
| this?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > And I would argue they haven't produced much usable
| stuff in the research realm at all
|
| I would disagree. C# and F# have been good. Advances in
| Haskell. AR advances. Those are all interesting, just off
| the top of my head.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > AR advances.
|
| For a while, but they seem to have faceplanted in this
| realm.
| nequo wrote:
| Adding to your list, Z3, Lean, F*, Koka are all non-
| trivial I think.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Other than Haskell, OSes in memory safe languagess whose
| System C# and Bartok features starting arring in .NET
| Native and .NET Core, Haskell contributions, plenty of
| Cloud stuff on Azure, Azure Sphere with Pluton, a LLVM
| like compiler stack using MSIL, contributions to OpenJDK
| JIT, Q# and Quantum stuff, ...
| brewdad wrote:
| The corporate tax structure was different back then as
| well. Much higher tax rates and it was far more difficult
| to simply ship your profits off to another more tax-
| advantaged nation. If the choice is spend the money
| hoping to find the next great innovation or hand it to
| your government and hope they do something productive
| with it, companies are usually going to choose the
| former.
|
| Today, you can license your profits to Ireland or some
| other off-shore holding company and never have to choose.
| hammock wrote:
| If you count OpenAI , Microsoft has produced a lot. Bell
| Labs existed in an era of conglomeration, where Microsoft
| existed in an era of startup culture, but the idea of
| monopolies spending cash on research is still there
| gessha wrote:
| > The US had that many decades ago when it sent people to
| the Moon
|
| This is a bad example. The only reason the US achieved it
| is because the Soviets ate their lunch over and over and
| over again.
| galdosdi wrote:
| And they did innovate in those days, eg, Gmail and purchase
| and integrate very innovative things like Writely (Docs),
| Grand Central (Voice).
|
| At some point they got the idea that because they made so
| much money, new innovations could not be valuable if the
| profits would likely be insignificant compared to the
| existing oil gusher.... which is stupid, because nothing is
| ever gonna look that good early on, so they took on the
| persona of a flaky ADD schemer -- like Cosmo Kramer from
| Seinfeld -- always scheming with some new idea, but never
| with the perseverance to stick with it for more than 25
| minutes before moving on to something else -- because what
| can possibly ever compete with ads?
|
| Google actually tried to be a "fuck you investors, we're
| gonna do research" company with the supershares, but they
| screwed up:
|
| A big mistake they made, which then got replicated
| throughout the industry, was issuing stock to employees. It
| meant that even though Larry and Sergey had supershares and
| no shareholders could countermand their beliefs, the
| employees (especially middle managers) could, by changing
| their work decisions to try to boost the stock, thus
| inoculating the company indelibly with the wall street
| short term thinking disease that the supershares were
| supposed to have prevented.
|
| It was pathetic how interested in the share price the
| average L4 Google employee was when I was there in the mid-
| teens, at least around the quarterly vest date.
|
| Whoops. Should have listened to Buffet-- never give out
| stock. Give performance bonuses, but never stock. You
| cannot depend on a large mass of people like that to stick
| to a higher purpose and not get tempted by the money.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| We individual employees had little control over stock and
| I don't remember anybody being particularly delighted
| when Patrick left and Ruth took over, despite the stock
| going up up up. I don't think our GSUs were influencing
| work decisions on aggregate.
|
| What _was_ influencing decisions was just the same as
| always: ad revenue. I think people who worked outside of
| ads at Google probably didn 't get the sense of it. I
| came into Google as part of a competition crushing,
| monopoly focused acquisition, so I started off cynical. I
| could see right away what Google was, just a money
| printing machine with everything else they did a way to
| flush some of the excess gravy away. And because of that
| it all lacked purpose or real motivation.
|
| And into that void just crept more and more careerism and
| empire building.
|
| Agree about the ADD thing, but I think it's more a
| product of Perf economy than stock price.
|
| I lasted there 10 years for lack of anything else
| worthwhile to go to in my geo-region, and because the
| money was too good to pass up. But what a weird, weird,
| weird place. Wandering around the MTV campus was like
| being in a real life Elysium (movie) or something. I
| could never figure out what _all those people were doing_
| between free meals. I felt guilty taking the money, the
| whole time.
| galdosdi wrote:
| Your experiences sounds very similar to mine.
|
| > I could see right away what Google was, just a money
| printing machine with everything else they did a way to
| flush some of the excess gravy away. And because of that
| it all lacked purpose or real motivation.
|
| This is precisely how I would summarize it too. Very well
| stated.
|
| > Agree about the ADD thing, but I think it's more a
| product of Perf economy than stock price.
|
| That I agree with, and I already regret implying stock
| was a bigger part of it than Perf/Promo-- I just wasn't
| thinking about them when I wrote that.
|
| Perf was a bigger factor for sure from our ground level
| (L3/L4/L5 presumably) and was the main reason I left, as
| all I saw around my on my team was people doing things
| that added zero value or even subtracted it, but at least
| they created a new project that would sound good for
| Promo committee. Managers helpfully shepherded their team
| in that direction, which was kind and all for growing our
| careers and helping us get more slop from the trough, but
| it still felt gross. I couldn't bear seeing that as my
| future.
|
| Sometimes, when I look at the housing market, or think
| about colleges for my daughter though, I regret not
| playing a long a little longer. I don't know.
|
| THAT SAID: I don't think the stock incentives affected
| decision making at your or my level, but at higher middle
| management levels, where GSUs started to become huger
| both in absolute value and percentage of compensation. At
| the levels of the people actually deciding what products
| to close down or pursue. I wasn't up at that level so
| this is just a theory I admit.
|
| Yeah, fair enough -- I still don't know if I've done a
| good job of successfully explaining to myself what the
| fuck it was I experienced working there and why, but it
| sounds like you and I had very very similar experiences.
|
| Everything about the internal incentive structure was
| fucked up and incentivized very low value producing
| behavior.
|
| And yet, I did learn some really valuable things there
|
| - napa cabbage is delicious
|
| - celery root is a thing
|
| - fresh made pasta is better
|
| - quiche and arugula pair great together
|
| - oh my god legit ramen is amazing
|
| Oh wait, outside of the food:
|
| - monorepos, with the right tooling, are unbeatable. all
| the monorepo haters just don't have the right tooling.
| google did
|
| - doing meetings right, with agendas and minutes, is also
| unbeatable, strictly better and more effecient than the
| alternative
|
| - doing planning right, by circulating proposed design
| plans for comments, is strictly more effecient than the
| alternative
|
| - doing cloud deployment right -- this is irrelevant now,
| most everyone knows how to do this now while google is
| stuck with legacy borg configs, but for a while, google
| actually was far ahead of the industry on this
|
| Despite having some fundamentals like that that made
| certain things way way more effective, it was squandered
| pursuing cockeyed goals.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep. Monorepos and fully vendored third-party deps, the
| two things I wish other people were doing... because the
| way the bulk of the industry is doing it is a stupid
| productivity killing, security, and reliability
| nightmare.
|
| I was always a square peg in the round hole there, and I
| have no idea how I lasted 10 years. I was at L4 the whole
| time and never made the move to even try for L5 because
| the perf process seemed like such stressful garbage to me
| and I was perfectly fine with my already generous
| compensation.
|
| I miss that kind of $$, but oh well. It got to the point
| I couldn't stand it anymore, and after watching the
| insane growth in hiring... I knew layoffs would be
| coming.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I wouldn't say fresh pasta is _better_ , it's different.
| Sometimes you want fresh, sometimes dried.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > Give performance bonuses, but never stock. You cannot
| depend on a large mass of people like that to stick to a
| higher purpose and not get tempted by the money.
|
| Well, if you gathered this big mass of people by dangling
| a nice pay and stock options in front of them then yeah,
| it does seem a bit odd to lament they are tempted by
| money.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > It was pathetic how interested in the share price the
| average L4 Google employee was when I was there in the
| mid-teens, at least around the quarterly vest date.
|
| How dare someone look out for their own financial well-
| being!
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| they did this ten to a billionth thing where everyone got
| to submit ideas. They hired an army to look at it all
| before it went into the incinerator.
|
| Im kinda curious what machine learning or llms could make
| from such a dataset. If enough people proposed something
| similar funding shouldn't be an issue. perhaps there is
| even an apples vs oranges metric for quality to be had.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Google _did_ launch a "moonshot factory", it just never
| really struck gold, with the possible exception of Waymo.
|
| https://x.company/
| fragmede wrote:
| Kubernetes seems to have gotten quite a bit of traction.
| I hear good things about transformers these days too. a
| lot of people I know use chrome
| stockboss wrote:
| what would be your argument for saying Google has been on a
| downhill slope ever since?
| refurb wrote:
| I was just going to say "Google 10 years ago"
|
| I've also seen it with biotech companies like Genentech.
| They are making money hand over fist, more and more each
| year, so they can try for moonshots and give researchers a
| lot more leeway to do things their way.
|
| But once the money dried up, it was mostly gone. Got bills
| to pay and need to show returns on R&D in the near term.
| passwordoops wrote:
| 3) tax laws that mandate buybacks + dividends cannot exceed
| more than a % value of R&D + CapEx spend.
|
| Otherwise 1+2 result in the C-suite deciding to divert all
| that cash to their pockets. Reference: the past 40 years of
| big business
| jszymborski wrote:
| Why can't we just fund scientists to acheive these goals?
| Funding has been lacklustre for years.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Because the marketplace is more efficient at directing the
| funding. I'm not a cheerleader for capitalism either, but
| it does work better sometimes.
| ikiris wrote:
| If by more efficient, you mean more efficiently switching
| to stock buybacks to pad owner pockets outside of tax
| consequences.
| typon wrote:
| Basically ALL the important inventions and scientific
| discoveries have been made at publicly funded
| universities.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Note the title of the article. Now look up where the
| transistor was invented. And the laser. And photovoltaic
| cells.
|
| I like public research too, I think there should be a
| hell of a lot more of it. It just isn't the only viable
| player.
| cobalt wrote:
| Based on the book "The Idea Factory"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory), it sounds
| like the regulated monopoly forced certain constraints on
| their business, such that they had to prove they were a
| utility. This meant not having infinite profits, and that the
| engineers were generally allowed to think long term since any
| good idea in the future could benefit the company without
| short term profitability risk
| TheCondor wrote:
| Hunger.
|
| Hunger and some money.
| femto wrote:
| 3) Politically savvy managers with a technical background,
| who treat money/sustainability as an enabling factor and see
| the primary output as being technical.
|
| The closest I every came to this was Australia's DSTO in the
| late 1980s. The management was technical and cared deeply
| about their people, the development of those people and
| making a positive technical contribution.
|
| An interesting recollection of Bell Labs:
|
| https://quello.msu.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/2015/08/Memories-N...
|
| I think it's not about recreating Bell Labs, but doing
| something better that will fit in with today's technical
| ecosystem. Are entry barriers lower today, or is that part of
| the problem: low entry barriers mean people don't have to
| congregate to get sufficient resources?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no
| immediate threat from competition"
|
| SpaceX right now is in a very similar position.
| Communitivity wrote:
| I think it requires a third thing: long-term thinking.
|
| Other commenters noted that Google and Microsoft had big
| piles of money and a decent moat. They have not created
| anything like Bell Labs. Google tried, with DeepMind.
|
| The problem is that companies used to think about 5,10,20
| years out. Modern companies are gauged and gauge themselves
| by metrics that are quarterly or annual. They, to borrow from
| The Fast and the Furious, are living their life one business
| quarter at a time.
|
| I don't think you can build something like Bell Labs, PARC,
| or the Lockheed-Martin Skunkworks with short-term thinking.
| YouWhy wrote:
| Thank you - that's a spot on answer. Bell Labs was the only way
| Ma Bell could stay relevant given that the rest of the world
| was making progress on their own.
| randomdata wrote:
| Perhaps you mean the only way they could maintain their
| monopoly? Bell Labs was Bell's bargaining chip with the
| government to allow it maintain its market dominance. The
| government allowed, at least for a long time, the monopoly to
| persist so long as Bell Labs was acting as a public good. As
| part of that social contract, Bell was not allowed to
| capitalize on what Bell Labs produced. I expect Bell Labs is
| so notable because the public at large was able to take their
| discoveries and turn them into productive ventures, to which
| they did. That's not completely unheard of today - LLM-based
| businesses being a recent example that stem from Google
| opening up research to the public - but it is unusual for
| today's research labs to give away _everything_. Today, not
| even the research labs with that explicit intent (OpenAI) are
| willing to give away everything (or much of anything).
| JackFr wrote:
| The evidence pointing toward monopoly is IBM TJ Watson Research
| and Xerox Parc.
| threatripper wrote:
| I wonder if we look back at Meta like this which pours ungodly
| amounts of Money into VR right now.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Probably, given that they've probably done more open research
| than anyone else (open compute, llama, basically all of the
| Big Data stuff came from papers by Google and code from
| Facebook).
|
| They're unlikely to be praised around here, but I think
| history will potentially be kinder to them.
| sudosays wrote:
| This makes me think of Meta's approach in open sourcing a lot
| of their AI efforts. I can't find the exact snippet from the
| Zuckerberg interview, but the reasoning was:
|
| If Meta open sources their models/tools and it gains wide
| adoption, ways will be found to run the models more efficiently
| or infrastructure/research built on top of Meta's work will
| ultimately end up saving them a lot of costs in future. Release
| the model that cost $10bn to make now, and save yourself
| billions when others build the tooling to run it at 1/10th the
| cost.
| blueboo wrote:
| It rings a bit false when juxtaposed with their $40b spend on
| the Metaverse...where was the savvy leveraging of the open
| source community then?
|
| Meanwhile Meta's competitors commoditise and glean profits
| from actually-SOTA LLM offerings.
|
| In any case, their hypothesis is testable: which open source
| innovations from Llama1/2 informed Llama3?
| skinner927 wrote:
| The leverage with the Metaverse was eventually users were
| supposed to create content which in turn makes the product
| better and brings more users.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It would require The Phone Company.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEiTxg21q8
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > In hindsight it's almost like a public/national research
| laboratory, that happened to be privately held.
|
| In more ways than one. Sandia National Laboratories (mentioned
| in the article) _is_ a national research laboratory, and since
| it was managed by AT &T from its inception in 1948 it was
| organized like Bell Labs. It's no longer managed by AT&T and
| its culture today feels a lot less like Bell Labs, but in the
| early days the employees called it "Bell Labs West." Sandia is
| the only national lab that has an AT&T origin story.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Dunno. Essentially AT&T founding is no different than tax
| founding. Any uni lab could recreate the conditions.
|
| I believe the academic system is way too gamed nowadays for these
| kind of institutions to not drown. Like, there is focus on
| metrics and numbers rather than fundamentals.
| ertgbnm wrote:
| The vertical monopoly is the big key. A uni lab couldn't
| replicate that.
| n4r9 wrote:
| > Being a subsidiary of a government-sanctioned, vertically
| integrated monopoly gave Bell Labs a broad research scope and
| freedom to pursue long-term research projects unavailable to most
| other industrial labs.
|
| This feels like a big-hitter. In the UK, most government
| expenditure these days is subject to a sort of KPI management
| process. It's very difficult to do long-term work when the team
| has short-term targets to fulfill. That said, I wonder if
| security-critical organisations like GCHQ work that way.
| Obviously Bell labs was a US phenomenon, but I'd be surprised if
| the same problem doesn't persist over there to some degree.
| readingnews wrote:
| You will not "recreate" it, as everything now is short term
| shareholder profit/dividend driven. As others and the article
| notes, they held the long view on innovation.
|
| We could really use a large number of bell labs today. It will
| not happen.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Craigslist is an example of where this doesn't occur but the
| innovation also doesn't exist.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, the trillion dollar market cap businesses got to where
| they are by focusing on short term shareholder profit (what
| does that even mean?) and dividends.
|
| Nvidia famously did not play the long game. Nor did Apple with
| their smartphone bet, or Amazon with their 10+ years of near
| zero profit margins while building a nationwide logistics
| network. Or Alphabet with their data centers, plowing billions
| into YouTube to give access to streaming HD video on demand
| around the world.
| readingnews wrote:
| All of your examples could be negated, I will just do one as
| an example:
|
| Apple did not spend 20+ years developing the smart phone
| thinking "I hope this research pays off". The same for the
| rest of your examples.
|
| Bell Labs, OTOH, was literally like "go do fundamental
| telecom and computer research, and we will see if we can use
| it to get ahead".
|
| Those are two different mindsets. Amazon had one goal so did
| Nvidia, Google, etc, with each venture you cited. Bell Labs
| was a _research park_ of exploration that we do not recreate
| today.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't see how you are negating my counter examples from
| your claim. If you are classifying decade+ investments as
| long term, then we will simply have to disagree.
|
| >as everything now is short term shareholder
| profit/dividend driven. As others and the article notes,
| they held the long view on innovation.
|
| While things might not be as hunky dory as in the heyday of
| Bell Labs, I don't think "everything" is accurately
| described as short term either.
| caddemon wrote:
| It's not just a corporate phenomenon. Academic research has
| increasingly shifted towards a goal of regularly churning out
| papers for the sake of getting publications, rather than being
| driven by curiosity and a desire to share knowledge. There
| isn't a proper long view in academia either and I think their
| heuristic for the greedy algorithm is even worse than just
| maximizing near term profits.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Google already did this. Google X, Google Brain, Deepmind...
|
| The invention of the transformer architecture that underpins
| modern AI, dozens of core papers in the field.
|
| What they haven't revolutionized is materials science. Memristor
| technology for example, is still grossly underdeveloped.
| nine_k wrote:
| Both memristors and 3D XPoint aka Optane are in a patent limbo.
| The current patent holders tried them, and found the current
| crop too hard and unprofitable, but further research and
| commercialization would require either buying the key patents
| or waiting for them to expire.
| pklausler wrote:
| Commercialization, yes, but not necessarily further research.
| jahewson wrote:
| Hard to get research funded when it can't be commercialised
| sufficiently to merit the risk.
| nine_k wrote:
| Fundamental research is likely unhindered.
|
| But any research of incremental improvements in an attempt
| to make the tech commercially viable is stymied.
|
| And I would love to see some accessible and available non-
| volatile RAM measured in gigabytes. It means computers that
| never get switched "of, no more than a paper book can be
| switched off. It would take a radically different approach
| to operating syssystems to reap the benefits though.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| That one's on Intel. They marketed Optane poorly and created
| a subpar product for the market they were tackling.
|
| The whole point of memristors is to make something better
| than DRAM and SRAM. Perhaps even blow up the dichotomy
| between storage and memory altogether (as memristor MRAM can
| store information even when powered down, unlike DRAM and
| SRAM). Let here we are in 2024 with no viable memristor
| products on the market.
| Balgair wrote:
| Holy crap! Someone else knows about memristors!
|
| Oh man, coming neuroscience I had no idea why these weren't
| being more researched. Thanks for the info there.
|
| Just as an FYI to y'all, a memristor is essentially how a
| synapse works. In that it's an electrical element that counts
| the change in charges across the leads over time
| (dCharge/dFlux or dq/dPhi). And all for very little power and
| it survives power cycles.
|
| Like, we talk about AI these days, but memristor
| incorporating hardware would really get us there. You'd just,
| you know, need to invent the solid state memristor first, and
| then make it commercially viable, and then redesign all of
| computer architecture from the transistor on up. Easy-peasy.
| lemoncucumber wrote:
| Unfortunately that's the Google of a decade or two ago. Today's
| Google is very focused on cost-cutting and I can't imagine them
| investing in new future-focused projects like those which are
| not under pressure to turn a profit any time soon.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| It's the circle of life, companies eventually get captured by
| accountants and lose their initial spark. Even companies like
| Microsoft had an era of exciting innovation.
| potsandpans wrote:
| I might argue that Microsoft had two distinct eras of
| innovation
| fuzztester wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Less and even less.
| novia wrote:
| The paper on transformers come out in 2017. Less than a
| decade ago.
| ozim wrote:
| 7 years is basically rounding error from a decade ago.
| novia wrote:
| https://research.google/pubs/?&
|
| Go look at the breakdown of the number of research papers
| coming out of Google. In 2023 there were 744, in 2017
| there were 637. Two decades ago, there were half as many.
| lrem wrote:
| No no, the new research does not have a proven track
| record of industry success, so it doesn't count ;)
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Just like _cough_ Bell Labs maybe?
| fuzztester wrote:
| mumble clayton mumble christensen
|
| mumble business cycles
|
| mumble corporate cycles
|
| mumble evolution
| fuzztester wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen
| fuzztester wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40999480
| blueboo wrote:
| Demis on designing DeepMind:
|
| "When we set up DeepMind, I took inspiration for our research
| culture from many innovative organizations, including Bell Labs
| and the Apollo program, but also creative cultures like Pixar."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/google-2023/unlocking-...
|
| As for materials science, there's signs of life in graph nets
| https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-
| materi.... Meanwhile maybe AlphaFold indicates a precedent
| towards deep learning systems that advance chemistry. I don't
| claim these are revolutions, but extrapolating into the future,
| they might be seen as the catalysts. Maybe.
| zacmps wrote:
| Personally I think chemistry is going to trail a long way
| behind biology for a while (in terms of ML solutions). The
| data, supporting libraries, and funding doesn't seem to be on
| the same level.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Lots of companies recreated Bell Labs.
|
| It's not the 20th century though.
| IshKebab wrote:
| A time machine.
|
| These places (Xerox Parc is the other obvious example) existed
| because recent breakthroughs opened up the possibilities and they
| exploited almost inevitable inventions.
|
| I think the mistake is thinking that the flurry of creation is
| linked to the _company_ or the _institution_ rather than the
| general state of progress.
|
| As soon as someone invents viable Human-Machine Interfaces or
| whatever there will be _some_ company that invents a load of
| seminal stuff around that.
| nine_k wrote:
| It certainly linked to a company or institution that were able
| to harness the potential and release the innovation as research
| or products. Not all of them.did.
|
| It's like wind energy: the wind blows for everyone, but some
| build a turbine or a windmill. (Though indeed, when the wind us
| not blowing, even the best turbine is going to be a
| disappointment.)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Didn't high top marginal tax rates in the 1960s-1970s era give a
| lot of corporations an incentive to put profits back into R & D
| as it would avoid high taxation on those profits (and I think the
| R & D outlay was a tax writeoff, too). E.g.
|
| https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-...
| akira2501 wrote:
| What would it take? Two world wars leading a protracted cold war
| between two "superpowers."
|
| No surprise that the end of the cold war brought about the end of
| our collective need of a closely held quasi-national entity like
| AT&T.
|
| I think the real question is "What would it take to recreate it
| in the abstract, from the disparate components we have attached
| to the internet today?" Or to rephrase it "What happened to the
| early promise of the internet when it was mostly available only
| through Universities?"
| r_hanz wrote:
| IMHO, the downfall is singularly: ad revenue. Monetizing your
| website/app/product indirectly in this way has been the sole
| source of many (all?) negative emergent features of modern
| software and products. i.e. a focus on attention in lieu of
| quality directly incentivizes utilizing things like dark
| patterns, addictive features, etc.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Corporate dominance.......Sorry!
| vondur wrote:
| At the most basic level it's all about money. ATT had a monopoly
| on telecom in the US and had the money to set up the research
| labs. After that you need people that can recognize and fine
| brilliant people in their respective fields and giving them the
| resources they need.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Bell Labs and things like it were around when the primary purpose
| of a business was to make money, and do it healthily, rather than
| to find a bigger fish. It's no wonder many of these companies
| were quite old. They created sound businesses.
|
| For the giants of today it's all about milking existing products
| for all their worth. Not finding new revenue avenues. The modern
| stock market is to blame. If number goes down then the earth is
| on fire apparently.
|
| The other aspect is, why try and innovate yourselves when you can
| wait for someone else to do it and then try and acquire them?
| It's short term thinking but that's what business is largely
| about these days.
|
| Maybe this will change with time. I suspect it will as the world
| is on a track to become more insular again. This may drive
| innovation at home.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Back in the day, people wanted to build a sustainable, long-
| term business. Now they just want to create profits, and it
| often happens by dismantling these great decades-old companies
| brick by brick, until the line don't go up no more. Then you
| collect your bonus and move on to the next victim. GE and
| Boeing have been gutted. What valuable company is next?
|
| We live in a time when the incentives are ass-backwards. Your
| customers should be first, your employees second, and only
| then, all the way in the back, are your shareholders. When the
| shareholders are placed first, you find yourself in broken,
| late-stage capitalism.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > For the giants of today it's all about milking existing
| products for all their worth. Not finding new revenue avenues.
|
| AWS/Azure/Google Cloud?
|
| Apple Watch/airpods/M processors/Vision Pro?
|
| Meta spending tens of billions on VR?
|
| Nvidia designing software to advance AI?
|
| TSMC and ASML and others working to get chips more efficient
| and powerful than ever before?
|
| Tesla popularizing electric vehicles and establishing charging
| networks.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I was thinking about a very small version of this topic the other
| day--how can you re-create the intrinsic motivation of a startup
| in a large company? My conclusion was you just can't. The
| combination of scarcity, urgency, and potential opportunity
| present in startups seems to catalyze something that can't (at
| least maybe not ethically) be simulated.
|
| Maybe in the large what we really need to get it together and
| pull these things off is immediate existential threat e.g. a
| world war or crisis of similar magnitude.
| nxobject wrote:
| Everyone talks about the monopoly - don't forget the pressure to
| Do Good Deeds and to look like You're Bringing New Tech to avoid
| the general public's grumbling about, well, having to rent your
| phone from Ma Bell for $$$$$ and to live with their restrictions
| on what you could hook up to their lines. An expensive PR
| operation, but a good one for sure.
|
| I prefer cynical explanations for why the C-suite would like to
| keep Bell Labs around, and other posters have also mentioned
| managing perceived profits, and avoiding anti-trust.
| mhneu wrote:
| The key thing is time horizon.
|
| Bell Labs invested in research that would bring payoff 20+ years
| in the future. That's in part because they were a quasi-monopoly.
| (Also because there was less pressure back then on execs to focus
| on short-term stock prices.)
|
| It's also because Bell Labs ran a lot on government contracts and
| grants. The government CAN look 20+ years in the future. And it
| does.
|
| You can see the same effect in pharma today. Pharma R&D develops
| drugs that will hit the clinic in the next 5-10 years at most.
| The true basic research of identifying targets and understanding
| cancer/Alzheimer's mechanisms to launch future drugs -- that's
| all funded by the government.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Agreed on the public-private nature of Bell Labs.
|
| I would also ask how we could recreate another exemplar in that
| space, DARPA. Now of course DARPA is alive and kicking, but
| what about another DARPA, say in Europe?
|
| The two organizations did have different missions, with DARPA
| being mostly an investor while Bell Labs was mostly a
| practitioner.
|
| The question that springs to mind is, why did Bell Labs decay
| while DARPA did not?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Altos Labs, which specializes on a very complicated topic
| (anti-aging, longevity), is fully privately funded, though.
|
| Even Bezos can look 20 years into the future and doesn't want
| to die.
| colinng wrote:
| We don't need to recreate Bell Labs.
|
| We have SpaceX and Starlink - that's where innovation is
| happening. Compare Dishy to the Starlink Mini (which can run off
| a power bank), or the first live-feed (no radio blackout period)
| on orbital re-entry. And they costed much less than ULA and
| provided much more to the public. Practically saved Ukraine (try
| defending your country with no communications). Or Tesla who has
| made EVs (and charging stations) an actual thing. Or Neuralink
| who's allowed a quadriplegic to use a computer like you and I.
|
| We don't need giant monopolies like Microsoft who - what did they
| deliver over the past 3 decades? A knockoff of the Mac. OSes full
| of vulnerabilities that require antivirus and firewalls. Clippy.
| Nearly killed Apple (who gave us the first usable GUI, all our
| songs in our pocket, and the first actually smart smartphone.)
|
| What does Microsoft do that is innovative? They buy actual
| innovative companies (they "own" OpenAI for all intents and
| purposes). But also open source dotnet. Typescript. LINQ and EF.
| And I hate to hand them the trophy, but the Surface Pro is a real
| computer - the iPad Pro can't do real work like build you an App
| or site with VS Code - it can't even run Apple's own XCode.
|
| We don't need giant monopolies. Plenty that smaller companies can
| do to outmaneuver incumbents. SpaceX will figure out passenger
| planes before anyone at the ULA will figure out how to make their
| spacecraft not leak.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| Lots of innovation came from Bell Labs or other national
| laboratories that are foundations of many modern technologies. I
| always thought that private sector alone cannot make
| technological progress fast without the help of the government
| sponsored science facilities. It is incredible to see what came
| out of those facilities because the scientists worked really hard
| because of their genuine interest in working on such projects
| because they either like the process of figuring things out or
| their curiosity cannot be quenched until they get it.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Also, it seems like promising (a real promise that can be
| backed up) researchers a comfortable upper middle class income,
| job security, good benefits, and light-touch supervision is a
| good match for the type of person who excels at basic research.
|
| Too little security and nothing ever comes to fruition. Too
| much money sloshing around and you attract the wrong sort of
| crowd.
|
| Public entities are best suited to providing this type of
| compensation and employment arrangement.
| navbaker wrote:
| That sounds exactly like my employer, the JHU Applied Physics
| Lab. We're a university affiliated research center, so we
| aren't tied to the government pay scale and can provide a
| better career advancement outlook.
| caddemon wrote:
| Don't grants still tie you to government pay structures? I
| know in biology most academic research labs may as well be
| government entities because that's the main way to get
| funding, and that funding has various rules attached
| including e.g. the max pay for a postdoc.
| navbaker wrote:
| No, we don't get funding through grants. Our work is
| either direct sponsored work or internal research funded
| through overhead. We aren't a federally funded R&D center
| like Laurence Livermore or MIT Lincoln Labs, we are a
| university affiliated research center.
|
| We exist in this nice middle ground between academia and
| pure profit companies where we do a bunch of research and
| exploratory work without the pressures of trying to get
| tenure, while also getting to push real products out to
| our sponsors but without ever worrying about getting laid
| off because we didn't meet some growth number for the
| quarter.
| unkoman wrote:
| From a non-tech perspective, IKEA, as a private company, shares a
| similar focus with Bell Labs on enhancing individual components
| to improve the overall system.
| nox101 wrote:
| What are some examples?
|
| What I've noticed buying Ikea stuff over the last 30 years so
| that it's gotten progressively lower-quality.
|
| Take for example their Kallax shelves. I've purchased them at
| least 4 times in the last 20 years, each time, a part that was
| metal before got replaced by a plastic or wood part, the wood
| got thinner or less dense, .... They still work so maybe that's
| innovative.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Many outfits have tried to reinvent the Lockheed Skunk Works, but
| to no avail, because they always tried to improve on it by
| removing its core principles.
|
| Though I must say, SpaceX may be its worthy successor.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| SpaceX doesn't really do any sort of frontier research. They do
| technology. They are taking concepts that have been done in the
| past and doing them more economically.
|
| They have pushed the state-of-the art with projects like
| Raptor-2, but doing fundamental research and simply doing
| engineering are different things.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Skunk works also did technology
| WalterBright wrote:
| The radar-invisible shapes came from a Soviet research
| paper!
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The C programming language was a successor of other
| programming languages, too. Not a completely new entity, the
| first programming language of the world.
|
| Innovations that aren't on the frontier of knowledge, but
| have great potential for mass deployment, are precisely those
| that tend to have the biggest impact on humanity as such.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I liked Bell Labs ever since 1986 or 1987 or so. I was
| considering developing a C++ compiler, but was concerned about:
|
| 1. would I need a license to develop a C++ compiler?
|
| 2. would I need a license to call it C++?
|
| So I called up their head intellectual property lawyer. He
| laughed, and said feel free, and thanked me for asking. He said
| other people just went ahead and copied things hoping BL wouldn't
| notice.
|
| So thank you, Bell Labs! You guys were the best.
| 1992spacemovie wrote:
| Ironically wholesome lawyer story. That's a short list btw.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is him:
|
| https://www.forbisanddick.com/obituaries/William-Bill-
| Ryan-2...
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Damn, RIP.
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| Thanks for the story, it illustrates the lack of cynicism in
| all ranks, compared to Microsoft, Google or even OpenAI today.
|
| I like reasons and conditions, but reproducing culture takes a
| lot more work. Though one feels the character and actions of
| Mervin Kelly were crucial.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mervin_Kelly
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Microsoft, Google or even OpenAI today.
|
| Probably an unrelated question, but why the "or even" caveat
| for OpenAI? They claimed to be an open non-profit, cynicism
| seems warranted at a level even moreso than Microsoft and
| Google.
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| You are right but for OpenAI there could exist in principle
| a strategy of beating the cynicism out of them by holding
| them to their word. I might have wanted to encourage people
| to be optimistic about that.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Who would do the beating there though? And why would
| OpenAI actually care to stick to their word?
|
| The whole CEO debacle seemed to make it pretty clear to
| me that OpenAI wasn't interested in being open or non-
| profit.
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| Elon might have stuck to his lawsuit, or someone like PG
| could come out strongly against Altman, but you might
| need someone of Mervin Kelly's stature and an army of
| lawyers to do it. Maybe Fei-Fei Li after she has earned
| her startup cred (so that the suits and politicians have
| the chance to take a technical leader seriously, put her
| on the board in place of Larry Summers, e.g.)
| _heimdall wrote:
| What's the ideal end acenario if someone does
| successfully smack them back down to stand by their
| original promises? And what's the worst case scenario if
| no one stands up to them?
| surfingdino wrote:
| It might be better for one's sanity to start looking at
| what people and orgs do instead of what they say or what
| others imagine/hope they do. It's a business and and the
| end of the day has to return all the money Microsoft
| invested in it. Ethics is what toilet rolls are made of
| at large corps.
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| Today, maybe, but I doubt you could have said that of
| Bell Labs, at least by Occam's razor. (Maybe they weren't
| a business all by themselves, but their output was
| effectively deployed to the parent concern by most
| standards)
| tdeck wrote:
| It's always interesting to read how many of the silicon
| valley startups were founded by people who had IP they'd
| developed at existing companies where they were told "we're
| not going to sell this feel free to take it and start a
| company". I feel like large companies are more reflexive
| about holding onto IP these days.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| While the current behavior likely is a consequence of the
| approach then. Their corporate lawyers don't want those legal
| aspects of the Unix wars, again and created their moat.
| petra wrote:
| Lets sat they had asked for some small royalty(3-5%), with
| simple legal terms and fast approval process, and it common
| accross all their IP.
|
| Would that be a problem?
|
| And isnt that a good thing, for the "ecosystem"?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| AT&T's liberal policies regarding software (and computer
| hardware) weren't out of the goodness of its cold blue
| corporate heart, but one episode out of over a century of
| antitrust enforcement against the original Bell System and its
| subsequent incarnations.
|
| Most specifically, the 1956 consent decree arrived at by the US
| Department of Justice. In part:
|
| _The consent decree contained two main remedies. The Bell
| System was obligated to license all its existing patents
| royalty-free, and it was barred from entering any industry
| other than telecommunications. As a consequence, 7,820 patents,
| or 1.3 per- cent of all unexpired US patents, in a wide range
| of fields became freely available in 1956. "
|
| <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190086>
|
| <https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/pol.20190086>
| (PDF)
|
| My understanding is that the decree also _specifically*
| prohibited AT&T from engaging in _either_ computer hardware or
| software markets. Consequence is that when AT &T developed
| operating systems, compilers, and associated software for the
| UNIX System beginning in 1969, it literally had no option _but_
| to give the fruits away gratis, or hold them internally.
|
| That restriction was lifted after the 1984 anti-trust
| settlement, though it took AT&T a few years to start acting on
| that. Once it did the result was the "Unix Wars" of the late
| 1980s / early 1990s, which amongst other effects put a strong
| damper on commercial viability of BSD-based Unix systems,
| whilst an alternative coded-from-scratch run-alike system
| originating out of Finland faced no such headwinds. That system
| was Linux.
|
| (This history is ... referenced in numerous sources, though I'm
| finding it difficult to turn up specifics. The 1956 DoJ
| settlement doesn't seem to be online at all, and this isn't the
| first time I've searched for it. Wikipedia discusses various
| elements of the AT&T antitrust actions, dating to 1913, but is
| fairly poorly sourced, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell
| _System#Kingsbury_Commitme...>. I'm pretty sure that the Unix /
| Linux history is covered in various sources, possibly some of
| ESR's writings or elsewhere. I'm pretty confident of my facts
| here, but would prefer being able to source my statements more
| concretely.)
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| This is all true of AT&T but remember Bell Labs was a
| subsidiary of AT&T, and by all accounts from the ground, the
| Bell Labs management were able to promote a culture shielded
| from the politics of AT&T.
|
| (Compare with GoogleX, similar intentions, maybe better
| starting conditions)
|
| IP issues-- an interesting case study would be how the BL
| managers handled Shockley.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I was born in '88 so I'm envious of people who have stories
| like these. I've yet to experience working for the kind of
| leader seemingly prevalent back then.
| GreedIsGood wrote:
| None of this addresses perhaps the main issue. Bell Labs predated
| the venture capital revolution of the 1970s.
|
| The key insight of venture capital was that firms like Bell Labs
| were holding on to very valuable resources at compensation rates
| that were far below what those resources could generate if they
| were empowered to create their own firms.
|
| This was tremendously successful. While we have no
| counterfactual, innovation in the US blosomed ove the last 50
| years. The fundamental research may have languished (I would
| probably disagree, moore's law didn't happen through magic for
| example) a tremendous number of companies, and all of the large
| companies we know of today, which provide all of the services of
| the modern world were a result of venture capital.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| I'm not sure that last part lands quite the way you meant it
| to.
| coliveira wrote:
| Moore's law is dead in the USA for almost 20 years. The
| improvements we see come from research in Asia and the
| Netherlands.
|
| Also the idea that US tech companies are doing much innovation
| is debatable. They are designing products for the international
| markets, but the core technologies are more and more coming
| from Asia.
| shrubble wrote:
| ASML is using basic research that was funded by the US
| government; that is why the US has the ability to
| veto/restrict who ASML sells the encumbered EUV and related
| other tech innovations, to.
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, the research was initially done in the US. The current
| research and development is now done by the group in
| Netherlands. There is nothing in the US that comes close to
| what they have now.
| dgfitz wrote:
| One of us has our geography confused, I think.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| It's not just ASML that is involved in R&D for new chip
| nodes. And ASML itself has a large part of its operations
| in the US.
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| VC is great for anything that doesn't need continuous
| cooperation from more than 1 domain of expertise, or where no
| expertise is even needed at the outset. Meritocracy, but
| atomized meritocracy.
|
| Hence, great for software (and certain Schwerpunkte in
| hardware scaling) --- not innovation in general, but in fact
| solidifying a technological caste system: designers > SWE >
| HWE > every other kind of technical expert
|
| Otherwise, you do need a Bell Labs to make sure your various
| experts are talking to one another and not constantly in fear
| of backstabbing by the management, their interns, other
| experts. (Especially considering in universities these days,
| rival groups in the same department have to make the same
| kind of calculations before cooperating)
|
| I can see that YC does pay lip service to building community
| and such, but perhaps VC is too successful for its own good.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Relevant username, I guess
| WalterBright wrote:
| Thomas Edison invented the first commercial invention laboratory.
|
| The Wright Bros invented the first directed research and
| development program, where theories are developed and tested on a
| series of prototypes, leading towards the objective.
| ge96 wrote:
| a ranch and infinite money
| kkfx wrote:
| What made Bell Labs so successful is simple:
|
| - public funds
|
| - researchers free to research instead of producing something
| marketable in 6 months or less
|
| - long term projects and goals as a NORMAL thing instead of being
| considered folly
|
| - a school system designed to make citizens not useful idiots
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef...
|
| Unfortunately the last point in the present time demand IN THEORY
| at least some new generations to be achieved, in practice the
| ruling class do not want at all anything like that so it's mere
| utopia.
|
| As a bottomline: EU was the most advanced countries of the world,
| when it do public funded research and industry, it commit suicide
| with WWI, the USA have copied and advance the EU model after
| WWII, then commit suicide as well with finaciarisation of
| anything, now it's China who rule, but the model, the substance
| is the same: countries grow and prosper with public funded
| research with long terms goals and researchers free to master
| themselves with the industry picking marketable research from
| them instead of commanding research. Countries might vary,
| populations might vary, implementations might vary a bit, but the
| principle so far have proved to be the same.
|
| As a result we are in a decline phase, which probably result in a
| series of LOST wars, and a long era of poverty and destruction
| before a new start.
| jofer wrote:
| Big oil arguably had some of the closest up until the past ~10
| years.
|
| I think folks may not realize how large Exxon and Shell's pure
| R&D labs are/were. The other majors have cut much more heavily on
| pure R&D in the past 20 years, but Exxon and Shell have always
| focused on pure research fairly heavily. It's been cut back in
| the past 10-ish years, but the R&D labs at both are still
| present. The breadth of it is significant, and while sure, it's
| geology, metallurgy, chemistry, etc (i.e. it's not what folks
| here likely think of as "tech"), it is fundamental research as
| opposed to applied research. A lot doesn't sure up under their
| R&D best because it's combined with internal consulting, but it's
| still a large group of folks hired to do r&d with diverse
| backgrounds.
|
| Those labs still exist today, but they're not as large as what
| they were in the recent past (e.g. 2010), and especially compared
| to their heyday in the 70's.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Considering what those companies did with the most valuable
| research they _ever_ produced, the climate predictions, they
| don 't seem particularly worthy of emulation.
| mcarmichael wrote:
| An important early impetus for research at AT&T was the immense
| labor component of contemporary switching technology. Hiring the
| number of qualified operators needed to scale out to a fully
| national phone system wasn't clearly possible, let alone sound
| business.
|
| The scale of the challenge over time is described pretty well
| here:
|
| https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...
|
| AT&T thus had both a clear long-term goal, national phone
| service, and multiple long-term research challenges needed to
| make that goal possible (amplification) and economically feasible
| (switching).
|
| For folks interested in delving further into Labs history, this
| recent paper has a wealth of relevant citations, while also
| clarifying some important corporate cultural framing that might
| otherwise be confusing:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365365963_BELL_LABS...
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| The gent in the photo was my postdoctoral advisor at Murray Hill.
| He's standing by the first CO2 laser which he invented and that
| was still in the lab I worked in when I was there.
| riemannzeta wrote:
| Very cool. What did you use it for?
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| The laser was 30 years old at the time and kept in
| expectation that it would go to a museum, perhaps to the
| Smithsonian or equivalent. I didn't use it in my work. My
| advisor's retired technician would still come in once every
| couple of weeks because of his love for the Labs. Towards the
| end of my stay he and I put in fresh gas tanks and fired it
| up. All the 1960s vintage glass, power supplies, mechanical
| and optomechanical systems worked and it lased like a champ
| and made firebrick beam dumps glow.
|
| I don't know what became of it.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Timing + Infinite Money
|
| This was only possible during what was an unprecedented
| revolutionary time in scientific discovery which allowed for the
| possibility 1925 - 2000 was the most revolutionary time across
| all fields of science, probably ever. It's mind boggling the
| progress made in that period.
|
| We will likely not see a repeat until someone comes up with a
| quantum-classical unifying law and the resultant blowing open of
| all possibilities of engineering
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| Another alien crash.
| kredd wrote:
| People who are more familiar with Bell Labs -- what was the
| compensation and life was like when one worked there? Were there
| any extremely alluring alternatives like FAANG of the day, where
| even a bottom line individual contributor can save a decent chunk
| of money after half a decade of work?
|
| It's hard to convince extremely talented and motivated people to
| go into research nowadays when ad-tech and adjacent products pay
| so much more. Can't even blame them, as it's extremely high risk
| with very low reward. Obviously there are a lot of exceptions,
| but still.
| fhd2 wrote:
| I dunno about that. I'm regularly _flabbergasted_ by what
| hackers will do just for fun, and how they run circles around
| an industry veteran like me.
|
| Look at the modding scene for games (an extreme example being a
| 30 year old obscure German game called "Gothic" where the
| modding community is still building amazing stuff on top of
| this ancient piece of software). Look at 3D printing, or people
| dabbling with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. Look at the Emacs
| community and all the packages people build with a level of
| attention to detail you rarely find in commercial software.
|
| Those people are all doing it for fun. That's my dictionary
| definition of "extremely talented and motivated people". The
| world is big, and I figure those kinds of people would happily
| work in a place where they can put their talents to use full
| time for a livable wage. Provided they don't feel like they got
| the short end of the stick compared to their
| colleagues/managers, financially or otherwise, maybe.
|
| Probably not in the average tech company bureaucracy with all
| the overhead, micro management, politics and user-hostile
| antics though.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Technicians in the lead instead marketing men.
|
| Public money instead short fad hunting venture capital
| fragmede wrote:
| OpenAI was founded in 2015. That's _long_ time for venture
| capital to wait for _possibly_ getting ChatGPT out there.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Bell Labs R&D budget in today's dollars would be about $1.5
| billion. Google is closer to $10 billion, with DARPA around $3
| billion and NASA at $10-15 billion. The total budget for all
| national labs is $12 billion.
|
| https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/comparing-research-bud...
| revskill wrote:
| Lol, i think C++ is main reason of decline for Bell Labs due to
| crash.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| If you haven't you HAVE to read "The Idea Factory" by Gertner
| which was linked in the article.
|
| I think the conditions that led to Bell Labs contrast quite well
| with the "Shareholder Supremacy" episodes of Ed Zitron's "Better
| Offline" that just played. You can read pre-Welch GE (or 10x
| better Bell Labs) as the opposite of the aspects of business that
| Zitron rails against there.
| ggm wrote:
| I'm not convinced you'd be able to replicate because it was a
| product of time and place. Mike Lesk, who worked at Bell (he
| implemented uucp, his motivation was purely to provide patch
| distribution according to what he told me) said one of the key
| experiences he took from Bell was how easy it is to occupy a
| vacuum and how hard it is to push aside established state.
|
| Unix exists. X11 exists. Kuberbetes exists. Gmail exists.
| Recreating a small team of highly accomplished experts with
| motivations which are not aimed at VC ipo, who are mutually
| trusting, and who have a beneficent employer with nation scale
| infrastructure they can burn to support you, and you still have
| the problem there's no vacuum, you're pushing aside other stuff.
|
| Giving birth to C and Unix in the ashes of BCPL and multics with
| the pdp11 as an architecture, that's a huge one time thing.
| Invent a time machine and it might not happen the same the second
| time round.
| consp wrote:
| Bell Labs is not unique though.
|
| We had NatLab (Natuurkundig laboratorium, physics laboratory) at
| Philips. It's the birth place of the compact cassette and compact
| disk and did a lot of fundamental research. The main reason for
| its closure is usually cited as decentralized funding techniques
| icw economic downturn, though the betting in the wrong technique
| in the '90s sure didnt help (e.g. better flat crts instead of
| lcd).
| max_ wrote:
| I wrote a review of a book which describes to me the best
| strategy for recreating Bell Labs like phenomena [0]
|
| [0]: https://asindu.xyz/posts/the-nature-of-technology-book-
| revie...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've seen this question pop up periodically, usually addressed in
| the context of a single, usually historical, example. Bell Labs
| seems to most often get the nod as the canonical "Blue Sky"
| corporate R&D lab, though Xerox, DuPont, and IBM are others.
| DuPont specifically is the subject of a book by David A.
| Hounshell, _Corporate Strategy: DuPont R &D, 1902--1980_.
|
| I'd suggest a broader consideration:
|
| - What are examples of extant or historical commercial R&D labs?
|
| - What large monopolistic companies haven't developed a
| significant R&D reputation, either for failure to establish a
| significant such operation, _or_ a failure to develop awareness
| of their operation?
|
| - What _business sectors generally_ have failed to establish a
| strong R &D tradition?
|
| I'm not going to go into a full answer for obvious reasons (a
| full response would be an interesting PhD thesis or course of
| study, not an HN comment), but we can outline some interesting
| aspects...
|
| The companies which _did_ establish large R &D labs have _tended_
| to be in high-tech areas, largely information technology though
| also chemical and hardware fields (DuPont, arguably Xerox).
|
| Specifically I'm aware of: Bell Labs (AT&T), PARC (Xerox), IBM
| Research, Kodak Research Laboratories, DuPont Central Resource,
| RCA Labs, General Electric Research Lab, Westinghouse Research
| Labs.
|
| Notably absent from singificant US industrial history: Railroads,
| shipbuilding, Steelmaking (e.g., US Steel), oil (Standard Oil),
| electric power utilities generally, and the financial services
| industry.
|
| The aerospace sector stands out for having far _less_ major
| corporate R &D research (or prominence) than one might otherwise
| expect. That's not to say that there are _no_ such operations:
| Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman all have R &D
| operations. A possibly explanation is that to a major extent Nasa
| and US military branches effectively provide R&D cover for the
| sector.
|
| My general sense is that there's less such activity in the
| sourcing sectors --- agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and
| livestock --- than might be expected, though Bayer (including
| Monsanto), Syngenta, DuPont, BASF, Cargill, and John Deere do
| have some activity. Again government research is significant
| (e.g., USDA, Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO), and significiant
| academic research (land grant universities in the US).
|
| Manufacturing, construction, and transportation generally seem to
| have a weak presence. To the extent that auto safety labs exist,
| many are strongly supported by the insurance sector. Device
| certification (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) are strongly
| similar. Both also see government consumer / product safety
| operations.
|
| Healthcare research tends to be organised around government
| units, academic research, and specifically-organised new-product
| (mostly pharmaceuticals, though also devices and processes)
| commercial operations, the latter often spin-offs of larger
| established pharmaceutical companies as a risk-isolation /
| diversification process. (Organisation of Novo Nordisk, recently
| notably for Ozempic, is its own fascinating story.)
|
| My general sense is that wholesale, retail, and financial
| services have little R&D in _in the spirit of Bell Labs and
| similar Blue Skies research. There 's quite a bit of tightly-
| focused product development, applied, and targeted research, but
| in scope, spirit, and freedom that's quite a different approach.
| There's some R&D in academic settings (retail/shopping
| behaviours, e.g.), or by government (the US Federal Reserve and
| the monetary system, adjunct to the financial sector).
|
| Teasing out some general trends, corporate Blue Sky research
| seems to be favoured by:
|
| - High tech fields, notably information technology, electronics,
| pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and to a lesser extent aerospace
| and energy research.
|
| - Less favourable sectors: traditional manufacturing, utilities,
| wholesale & retail trade, heavy industry, extractive industries,
| and transportation.
|
| - A strong and long-term stable corporate structure. Note that
| AT&T was initially founded in 1885, whilst Bell Labs wasn't
| established until 1925, 40 years later. DuPont preexisted its own
| labs by a century (founded in 1803 and 1903 respectively). RCA
| (1919) predated its labs (1942) by 23 years. Xerox (1906)
| predated PARC (1970) by 64 years. Labs don't spring up overnight,
| and even large and technical companies might not form labs if
| their tenure is short.
|
| - Monopolistic tendencies. Labs tend to form around monopolies,
| though this may be derivative of longevity. Not all monopolies
| form labs.
|
| - Payoffs to R&D. In Hounshell's book on DuPont, much is made of
| the comparative fecundity and sterility of early (1930s) and
| later (1960s, 1970s) research. Effectively, the viable product
| search space had much early low-hanging fruit, particularly in
| the 1930s (most plastics we know of today were discovered over
| roughly a decade), and the failure to find marketable products or
| enhancements by the 1960s (notably a synthetic "leather" product,
| "Corfam").
|
| - Insufficient or ineffective government-lead or academic
| research. In numerous fields, the most significant R&D still
| occurs in government / academic settings.
|
| - Corporate mentality and mindset, possibly. There seem to be
| fields, _including those with significant research potential* in
| which R&D and sharing cultures simply don't exist to any great
| extent. I'd put finance and insurance in this group. "Why"
| remains a good question.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Great contribution!
| 3298479328 wrote:
| 1. LSD hippie culture/aftermath 2. Pre-privatised/embryonic
| technology industry 3. A few geniuses
|
| The question implies time travel, better to look to the future
| inglor_cz wrote:
| To a degree, SpaceX is modern equivalent of Bell Labs when it
| comes to space technology. They attracted a lot of frighteningly
| smart people and untied their hands.
|
| When thinking about Bell Labs etc., I often come to the
| conclusion that barriers matter more than anything else. If you
| force your engineers and scientists to hold long pointless
| conferences and produce some papers on regular schedule, plus
| submit their various work-related demands to an arbitrary set of
| rules and decision-makers, the result is similar to throwing sand
| into a mechanical machine.
|
| But these limitations usually exist because of money shortage /
| funding, and few people or organizations have enough money to
| just shower them on their eggheads, like Bell Labs once did.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It would require dismantling, or at least scaling down, fintech,
| because that's where many smart people end up - the ones who
| would have been inventing Cool New Stuff if they hadn't been co-
| opted into working as quants.
|
| There have been at least two lost generations of fundamental
| research because of this.
| betaporter wrote:
| A marginal tax rate that discourages profit hoarding.
|
| Any other answer is just _wrong_.
| NickNaraghi wrote:
| For those who would like to read more about Bell Labs, I highly
| recommend "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner[0] - one of my all
| time favorite books.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory
| ricksunny wrote:
| I would like to ask Col.Karl Nell (ret.) who was working there
| during Bell Labs' trivestiture: (timestsmped):
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w9cIcWWsH0c&t=75
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Probably a top ten mistake by the government to break up bell
| labs.
| shockleyje wrote:
| I'm the last relative of William Shockley (cited in the story)
| who's still in the industry.
|
| I like the way this story portrays his success in solving open-
| ended problems as long as they aligned with the company
| direction. I've personally never made that connection between us,
| but it resonates with where I've personally found success, and
| currently am, in my career as well.
|
| Fortunately, a lot of our beliefs about the world are quite
| different.
| sp_nster wrote:
| I'll leave this here. AT&T Labs is still doing interesting
| things.
|
| https://about.att.com/sites/labs
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well, that's an easy question to answer: it would take more
| standup meetings, more status reports, more story point
| estimation, more mandatory spyware, more quarterly (or monthly!)
| goal setting, more planning poker, more sprint retros and way
| more non-technical middle management. That is, after all, the
| only path to Agility. If it's not working, you're not doing it
| hard enough.
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