6 ms·

And all of these, in terms of quality of research output, pale by about an order of magnitude in comparison to Bell Labs for much of its existence (particularly

by j1vms 10y ago

And all of these, in terms of quality of research output, pale by about an order of magnitude in comparison to Bell Labs for much of its existence (particularly in the era ~1940 to mid 1980s). They were the R&D benchmark for most improvements to IBM Research from the 1960s onward. Additionally IBM sought out its alumni and populated their ranks with notable management and research minds from the Bell Labs stable.

Cyph0n 10y ago
You could probably bundle all of the achievements of the aforementioned companies into a single decade of research output from Bell Labs. It's not a fair comparison at all.
- j1vms 10y ago
  > It's not a fair comparison at all. Especially since Bell Labs sat within a state-sponsored (enforced?) monopoly until the mid-80s, so there was no direct concern about revenue. Which is not to belittle them in the least as they made outstanding organizational decisions, and had the most enviable pure research->development->production pipeline to this day. In terms of the R&D USA, the closest comparison is IBM (which also enjoyed a monopoly for some of its existence). MS's monopoly, with the benefit of hindsight, was feeble in comparison even to IBM's -- though they, like IBM, are absolutely one of the greats and have redeemed themselves particularly in the past few years.
airesQ 10y ago
Not sure if anything can be considered successful when compared with Bell Labs. It is a very high bar to meet (given they mostly invented transistors, information theory, unix and c). The modern world is to great extent a byproduct of the experiment that was Bell Labs. Some laugh, and say that it was experiment that has gone awry.
- leereeves 10y ago
  And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it. Much like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (inventors of the mouse, GUI, and object oriented programming), which Xerox failed to profit from.
  - seeekr 10y ago
    > And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it. I get that point. We're all interested in building great and successful companies on here, so of course it's a bummer when there is success from one perspective, but the whole thing kinda doesn't work out overall. But I also want to ask: As a society, don't we benefit so much from any advancements made in the open, through publicly shared research as well as the open source movement, that sometimes we would do well to just bask in the glory of those advancements and never mind what individual entities (financially, structurally) stuck around or not, profited or not, in the procuring of said advancements? It's also very clear of course that it is beneficial to look at the past in a discerning way, learn from it, make it better now and in the future. Still, there's something about the thought in the paragraph above that I wanted to bring up.
    - leereeves 10y ago
      I just meant that, in the context of this post, and given the poor history of corporate research turning into corporate profits, I can understand Apple's reluctance to fund blue sky research. I do admire a company that contributes in that way, recognizing that it's a contribution to humanity rather than investment for future profits.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    > "And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it." I'd suggest that was due to the anti-trust case against Bell more than anything else. For example, I believe AT&T were forbidden from selling Unix direct to consumers for many years, leading them to licence Unix to other entities (in the business and academic worlds).
    - 10y ago
- seeekr 10y ago
  As someone who doesn't know a whole lot about Bell Labs, its history, how it worked, etc: Why and how did it produce so much great research output? What was different or special about Bell Labs? Answers as well as pointers to other material appreciated!
  - grzm 10y ago
    "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner is a fantastic book on this subject. I highly recommend it.
  - krenoten 10y ago
    They had an incentive to doggedly seek IP so that they could remain as entrenched as possible. They didn't plan on actually profiting from it in most cases, they just wanted to be the first ones there so that nobody else could be.
- cmarschner 10y ago
  Bell Labs was special in that (a) they were building the largest system known to mankind at the time (an effort only rivaled by Manhattan snd Apollo projects) where they (b) couldn't use standard components but had to invent every piece by themselves, from the cables to amplifiers to satellites and lasers. Furthermore they were (c) very special in that they helped the government on certain projects like Manhattan, got a decades-long minopoly in return, and had to make their patent portfolio publicly available. In other words they were a semi-public organization with a very well-defined goal, that of building and optimizing the telephony system. Only when it became clear that a monopoly was no longer needed due to advances in technology did Bell lose its privileges, and with it Bell Labs started to wither. It does seem to be a pattern that companies that have created monopolies tend to use their excess money to start showing behaviors of a public service. Namely the research departments of Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, Google and now facebook all come from current or former (quasi-)monopolies.
  - rjdevereux 10y ago
    Peter Thiel wrote an article along these lines.. http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l... "A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world. Google's motto—"Don't be evil"—is in part a branding ploy, but it is also characteristic of a kind of business that is successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't"
    - koalaman 10y ago
      But Google had its culture before it got rich didn't it? There are also a lot of small tech companies like 37 signals and fog creak that try to be ethical and and treat their employees well. I don't think thiel could argue that they are monopolies. Nor frankly do I buy that Google is a monopoly. But that's beside the point.
EGreg 10y ago
I once read a Microsoft research paper. I think its central premise had a fatal flaw: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/buridan.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/b... The author confused continuity of the DECISION FUNCTION with continuity of the OUTCOME CURVE. In other words, an algorithm such as "keep trying to make a decision until you notice that t > C, after which always pick the left one" will in fact NOT have a continuous outcome curve, despite the decision function being continuous.
- tunesmith 10y ago
  That's Leslie Lamport, winner of the 2013 Turing Award.
- cscurmudgeon 10y ago
  Even the best scientists are not machines. It is naïve to think that the best papers are flawless. (I used to think so when starting grad school.) They is not.
- krenoten 10y ago
  That's a great example of how even some of the most influential minds are fallible. Lamport is sort of the god of distributed systems, having invented vector clocks, paxos which is how there is any sanity in modern data centers (chubby, ZK, etcd, etc... are based on the core ideas of this), TLA+ for reasoning about correctness, so much great stuff. Check out some of these! http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
  - EGreg 10y ago
    Amazing work :-)
- EGreg 10y ago
  I should admit that after writing this, I went back and forth with him over email and he convinced me he was right, after all. That continuity assumption he made is there in Newtonian Mechanics and other very widely accepted models. Something just feels off about the whole assumption. maybe I spent too much time with digital computers. Those models have a hard time explaining the non-reversibility of time also.

by j1vms 10y ago

Cyph0n 10y ago

You could probably bundle all of the achievements of the aforementioned companies into a single decade of research output from Bell Labs. It's not a fair comparison at all.

j1vms 10y ago
> It's not a fair comparison at all. Especially since Bell Labs sat within a state-sponsored (enforced?) monopoly until the mid-80s, so there was no direct concern about revenue. Which is not to belittle them in the least as they made outstanding organizational decisions, and had the most enviable pure research->development->production pipeline to this day. In terms of the R&D USA, the closest comparison is IBM (which also enjoyed a monopoly for some of its existence). MS's monopoly, with the benefit of hindsight, was feeble in comparison even to IBM's -- though they, like IBM, are absolutely one of the greats and have redeemed themselves particularly in the past few years.

airesQ 10y ago

Not sure if anything can be considered successful when compared with Bell Labs. It is a very high bar to meet (given they mostly invented transistors, information theory, unix and c). The modern world is to great extent a byproduct of the experiment that was Bell Labs. Some laugh, and say that it was experiment that has gone awry.

leereeves 10y ago
And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it. Much like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (inventors of the mouse, GUI, and object oriented programming), which Xerox failed to profit from.
- seeekr 10y ago
  > And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it. I get that point. We're all interested in building great and successful companies on here, so of course it's a bummer when there is success from one perspective, but the whole thing kinda doesn't work out overall. But I also want to ask: As a society, don't we benefit so much from any advancements made in the open, through publicly shared research as well as the open source movement, that sometimes we would do well to just bask in the glory of those advancements and never mind what individual entities (financially, structurally) stuck around or not, profited or not, in the procuring of said advancements? It's also very clear of course that it is beneficial to look at the past in a discerning way, learn from it, make it better now and in the future. Still, there's something about the thought in the paragraph above that I wanted to bring up.
  - leereeves 10y ago
    I just meant that, in the context of this post, and given the poor history of corporate research turning into corporate profits, I can understand Apple's reluctance to fund blue sky research. I do admire a company that contributes in that way, recognizing that it's a contribution to humanity rather than investment for future profits.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it." I'd suggest that was due to the anti-trust case against Bell more than anything else. For example, I believe AT&T were forbidden from selling Unix direct to consumers for many years, leading them to licence Unix to other entities (in the business and academic worlds).
  - 10y ago
seeekr 10y ago
As someone who doesn't know a whole lot about Bell Labs, its history, how it worked, etc: Why and how did it produce so much great research output? What was different or special about Bell Labs? Answers as well as pointers to other material appreciated!
- grzm 10y ago
  "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner is a fantastic book on this subject. I highly recommend it.
- krenoten 10y ago
  They had an incentive to doggedly seek IP so that they could remain as entrenched as possible. They didn't plan on actually profiting from it in most cases, they just wanted to be the first ones there so that nobody else could be.
cmarschner 10y ago
Bell Labs was special in that (a) they were building the largest system known to mankind at the time (an effort only rivaled by Manhattan snd Apollo projects) where they (b) couldn't use standard components but had to invent every piece by themselves, from the cables to amplifiers to satellites and lasers. Furthermore they were (c) very special in that they helped the government on certain projects like Manhattan, got a decades-long minopoly in return, and had to make their patent portfolio publicly available. In other words they were a semi-public organization with a very well-defined goal, that of building and optimizing the telephony system. Only when it became clear that a monopoly was no longer needed due to advances in technology did Bell lose its privileges, and with it Bell Labs started to wither. It does seem to be a pattern that companies that have created monopolies tend to use their excess money to start showing behaviors of a public service. Namely the research departments of Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, Google and now facebook all come from current or former (quasi-)monopolies.
- rjdevereux 10y ago
  Peter Thiel wrote an article along these lines.. http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l... "A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world. Google's motto—"Don't be evil"—is in part a branding ploy, but it is also characteristic of a kind of business that is successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't"
  - koalaman 10y ago
    But Google had its culture before it got rich didn't it? There are also a lot of small tech companies like 37 signals and fog creak that try to be ethical and and treat their employees well. I don't think thiel could argue that they are monopolies. Nor frankly do I buy that Google is a monopoly. But that's beside the point.

EGreg 10y ago

I once read a Microsoft research paper. I think its central premise had a fatal flaw: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/buridan.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/b... The author confused continuity of the DECISION FUNCTION with continuity of the OUTCOME CURVE. In other words, an algorithm such as "keep trying to make a decision until you notice that t > C, after which always pick the left one" will in fact NOT have a continuous outcome curve, despite the decision function being continuous.

tunesmith 10y ago
That's Leslie Lamport, winner of the 2013 Turing Award.
cscurmudgeon 10y ago
Even the best scientists are not machines. It is naïve to think that the best papers are flawless. (I used to think so when starting grad school.) They is not.
krenoten 10y ago
That's a great example of how even some of the most influential minds are fallible. Lamport is sort of the god of distributed systems, having invented vector clocks, paxos which is how there is any sanity in modern data centers (chubby, ZK, etcd, etc... are based on the core ideas of this), TLA+ for reasoning about correctness, so much great stuff. Check out some of these! http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
- EGreg 10y ago
  Amazing work :-)
EGreg 10y ago
I should admit that after writing this, I went back and forth with him over email and he convinced me he was right, after all. That continuity assumption he made is there in Newtonian Mechanics and other very widely accepted models. Something just feels off about the whole assumption. maybe I spent too much time with digital computers. Those models have a hard time explaining the non-reversibility of time also.