3 ms·

Is there a modern day version of what Bell Labs was at its peak?

• dnamlin 4y ago
  Not really, to the extent that Bell Labs undertook true basic research for its own sake, without much concern for any short/medium-term commercial potential. (No need to rock the boat commercially, while the parent corporation had a regulated monopoly to milk!) Maybe some case could be made for Alphabet's "Other Bets" collectively, but...the Bell Labs column has nine Nobel Prizes in it...
  • graderjs 4y ago
    Yes, that's one disadvantage of anti-trust...we miss this second-order effect :.(
• grubbs 4y ago
  I don't think so. I'm definitely oversimplifying here...but at one point they literally employed 1000+ PhDs to just figure things out.
• jeffbee 4y ago
  Perhaps you could make a case that the DOE-era national labs, collectively, have a similar basic science mission, and their rise coincides with AT&T's decline.
• uni_rule 4y ago
  Not quite, research for its own sake in that vein was attributed to the collapse of RCA, so most companies not in such a position didn't quite pursue it. I would then only make gestures towards federal labs like DARPA, Los Alamos, NASA campuses, etc.