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As an interesting counterpoint to the idea of "just hire smart people and give them a lab", Ralph Gomory, head of IBM Research (a peer of Bell Labs in its day)
by scrlk 1y ago
As an interesting counterpoint to the idea of "just hire smart people and give them a lab", Ralph Gomory, head of IBM Research (a peer of Bell Labs in its day) from 1970-86 said:
> There was a mistaken view that if you just put a lab somewhere, hired a lot of good people, somehow something magical would come out of it for the company, and I didn't believe it. That didn't work. Just doing science in isolation will not in the end, work. [...] It wasn't a good idea just to work on radical things. You can't win on breakthroughs - they're too rare. It just took me years to develop this simple thought: we're always going to work on the in-place technology and make it better, and on the breakthrough technology. [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/VQ0PBve6Alk?t=1480 https://youtu.be/VQ0PBve6Alk?t=1480
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bluGill 1y agoEvery breakthrough needs many 'man years' of effort to bring to market. research is good but for every researcher we need several thousand who are doing all the hard work of getting the useful things to market in volumn.
- leoc 1y agoSpeaking of which https://substack.com/home/post/p-115930233 https://substack.com/home/post/p-115930233 : > John Pierce once said in an interview, asserting the massive importance of development at Bell: >> You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories…only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.
- kqr 1y agoIt gets even more nuanced. As I understand it, Pierce was not great at the pursuing part and often managed to enthuse others to follow his ideas instead of doing it himself. So maybe it is only natural that someone like Pierce would notice how much effort it takes to follow up.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kmeisthax 1y agoRCA tried to duplicate Bell Labs' success and it arguably bankrupted the company.
- OutOfHere 1y agoI suspect the MBAs contribute in no small part to the bankruptcy.
- whiplash451 1y agoOut of curiosity: is there a write up about this?
- MrRadar 1y agoThe Technology Connections video series on RCA's Selectavision CED home video system touches on this quite a lot (it was a horribly mismanaged project which took more than a decade to commercialize, by which time it had already been superceded by VHS/Betamax and Laserdisc)[1]. His main source for the information on the development of the CED system was the book "The Business of Research: RCA and the VideoDisc" by Margaret B. W. Graham. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA&list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVP0SGNlBiBtFVkV5LZ7SOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA&list=PLv0jwu7G_D...
- Animats 1y agoRCA's Sarnoff Labs produced the image orthicon, NTSC color TV, an early videotape system, an early flat-panel-display, and lots of vacuum tube innovations.[1] The big business mistakes were in the 1970s, when RCA tried to become a diversified conglomerate. At one point they owned Hertz Rent-A-Car and Banquet TV dinners.[2] [1] https://eyesofageneration.com/rca-sarnoff-library-photo-archives/ https://eyesofageneration.com/rca-sarnoff-library-photo-arch... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA
- sidewndr46 1y agoThis seems to be the fate of many companies. Rockwell at one point somehow was producing the space shuttle while also having a division that made automotive components.
- leoc 1y agoEric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-know https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-k... came to a similar conclusion. (It did well here just a couple of months ago, too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295865 , so it is a little disappointing that the discussion seems to be starting from the beginning here again.) Another point which you've both made is that other big US firms had very important industrial research labs, too. (RCA Labs is one that seems to get little love these days, at least outside the pages of We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-were-burning/9780465091188/ https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... Also, to be fair, "Areoform" did mention Xerox PARC once in TFA.) Indeed, overstating the uniqueness of Bell Labs helps to billow up the clouds of mystique, but it's probably harmful to a clear understanding of how it actually worked. But the ultimate problem with TFA is that it seems to be written to portray venture capitalists(?), or at least this group of VCs who totally get it, as on the side of real innovation along with ... Bell Labs researchers(?) and Bell Labs executives(?) ... against the Permanent Managerial Class which has ruined everything. Such ideas have apparently been popular for a while, but I think we can agree that after the past year or two the joke isn't as funny as it used to be anymore.
- smj-edison 1y agoJust read that article you mentioned--I find the most interesting part of it is "system integrators," or those who intentionally pay attention to both the research going on, and the on-the-ground problems. It's fascinating how it mentions how they brought information back and forth, and even generated new ideas from all the connections they formed.
- whatever1 1y agoExxonMobil also closed this year the NJ based prolific Corporate Strategic Research center that among many chemical process related breakthroughs, identified the CO2 emissions risks (way before academia), and invented the lithium battery.
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- pydry 1y agoWho ever said that they should be isolated? The key differentiator was giving them freedom and putting them in charge, not isolating them.
- kqr 1y agoI recently read about Atari attempting to do the same thing in the 1980s (headed by Alan Kay, no less!) Market changes forced them to shut down the attempt a few years later due to lack of funding.
- PaulRobinson 1y agoAnd yet I can list a lot of things that Bell Labs did that changed the World, and yet I am struggling to name even one that came out of IBM Research. I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying that work didn't resonate as strongly.
- scrlk 1y agoDynamic random access memory, RISC, relational databases, laser eye surgery. Less mainstream but significant: scanning tunnelling microscope, high temperature superconductivity, fractal geometry.
- xhkkffbf 1y agoTwo back-to-back Nobel Prizes 1986-87. That's pretty cool.
- pmcjones 1y agoSQL, cost-based database query planning, transaction locking, … — System R.
- cmrdporcupine 1y agoIn the end the amazing research work done at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC and (to some degree) IBM Research didn't benefit their benefactors so much as they benefited the industry and arguably the world as a whole. Which is a specific weakness of the model of capitalism we have moved into in the west during my lifetime -- the gradual defunding or deprecation of state sponsored planning and research means there's little room for improvements that travel across the walls of corporate ownership. Instead this work is being done on the whole voluntarily in the open source domain, and is likely undercompensated. Where companies cooperate on cross-company technical standards committees, it's often very painful and the results often dubious.
- zamalek 1y agoWhat's the concrete data behind his assertion? I have no doubt he's correct about ideas being rare, but supply/demand laws would then dictate that those ideas are very valuable - if money is what matters to you (I suspect that money wasn't the top priority for Bell labs, but as always lights do need to be kept on).