4 ms·

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 compa

• 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.