3 ms·

The Bell Telephone monopoly was among the biggest of the bigcorps of that era and had no shortage of MBAs. A better characterization might be that the Ma Bell

The Bell Telephone monopoly was among the biggest of the bigcorps of that era and had no shortage of MBAs. A better characterization might be that the Ma Bell had money to burn and computerization was a hot trend so the bean counters were willing to back speculative projects and research, not unlike VCs throwing money around.

bonoboTP 1y ago
There's a danger of romanticizing the past, but I think there was just less metric based pressure on these people than today. In the 70s, the whole consultant-led transformation of all corporations wasn't fully complete yet.
gbacon 1y ago
The article even makes reference to the use-or-lose approach to managing a departmental budget: And history shows that it happened partly because the department paying for it “had extra money, and if they didn’t spend it, they’d lose it the next year…”
- fuzztester 1y ago
  Like in government departments and also in some companies that have a similar mentality.
cestith 1y ago
It’s worth remembering this was Bell Labs. It was a research and development organization. These weren’t line maintenance people and telephone operators free to create things during their work. They did a lot of applied research and a lot of pure research at Bell Labs back in the day. Lasers, fiber optics, underseas cables, communication satellites, transistors, discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and more came out of that organization. It was largely supported by the consent deal between the US government and AT&T that allowed them a telephone monopoly so long as their non-telephone research and inventions didn’t get marketed separately. So they’d create things that helped the company and the rest of the world, and then just release those things to the rest of the world.

3 ms·

The Bell Telephone monopoly was among the biggest of the bigcorps of that era and had no shortage of MBAs. A better characterization might be that the Ma Bell

by ThrowawayR2 1y ago

bonoboTP 1y ago
There's a danger of romanticizing the past, but I think there was just less metric based pressure on these people than today. In the 70s, the whole consultant-led transformation of all corporations wasn't fully complete yet.
gbacon 1y ago
The article even makes reference to the use-or-lose approach to managing a departmental budget: And history shows that it happened partly because the department paying for it “had extra money, and if they didn’t spend it, they’d lose it the next year…”
- fuzztester 1y ago
  Like in government departments and also in some companies that have a similar mentality.
cestith 1y ago
It’s worth remembering this was Bell Labs. It was a research and development organization. These weren’t line maintenance people and telephone operators free to create things during their work. They did a lot of applied research and a lot of pure research at Bell Labs back in the day. Lasers, fiber optics, underseas cables, communication satellites, transistors, discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and more came out of that organization. It was largely supported by the consent deal between the US government and AT&T that allowed them a telephone monopoly so long as their non-telephone research and inventions didn’t get marketed separately. So they’d create things that helped the company and the rest of the world, and then just release those things to the rest of the world.