> Being a subsidiary of a government-sanctioned, vertically integrated monopoly gave Bell Labs a broad research scope and freedom to pursue long-term research p

> 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.