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Very true that AT&T was no saint but it should come as no surprise that Bell Labs is romanticized when one looks at how Epic their output was. From a sample of
by Dn_Ab 13y ago
Very true that AT&T was no saint but it should come as no surprise that Bell Labs is romanticized when one looks at how Epic their output was. From a sample of their employees we have: Information Theory, karnaugh maps, the transistor, laser, photovoltaics, CCDs, C,R, Unix and for kicks - stumbling upon CMB hence enriching our understanding of the universe, it's age and size. It's mind boggling. No company today comes anywhere near that in terms of fundamentally rearranging knowledge and society.
I would argue that if Bell Labs was 8 or 9 on the Richter Scale then Microsoft Research, at a 4 or 5, is the closest we have today in terms of independence and diversity of research unfettered by profit concerns.
One guess for why Bell Labs was able to achieve so much is that on one hand they had decades of fundamental new insights by Brilliant physicists and mathematicians ripe for the picking (as evinced by multiple cases of identical independent inventions) and on the other hand they had the backing of a monopoly of incredible proportions. The planets don't often align like that.
Monopolies and excess profit are almost always a sign of market failure. However, some have argued that one of the benefits of a monopoly is it allows firms to reinvest some of that beyond normal profits and reduced costs on R&D (also typically argue monopolies are temporary because creative destruction). If you consider that only those like Google, Samsung, GE, IBM and Microsoft can even consider such broad-based research then it seems there is merit to the idea. Yet, the terrain of something so complex as innovative output should not have a single and global optimum.
- hyp0 13y agoOther monopolies have produced great things: Xerox's PARC labs, IBM. But not always: Standard Oil, East India Company. Maybe opportunity (as you note) plays a part.
- vanderZwan 13y ago> East India Company Another issue might be that we are focussing a bit too much on technical innovation. Because if you mean the Dutch East India Company (better known as the VOC), there is no denying that it was very innovative from an economics standpoint. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
- foobarian 13y agoAt the risk of sounding like that guy who said that everything that could be invented, was, I'd add a third point that Bell Labs' heyday was right during a golden era of discovery where there was a ton of low hanging fruit to be had. It was really a perfect storm of science. I doubt this could be repeated today even if you somehow copy pasted the Bell Labs from 1960 including their staff and culture. I'd love to be wrong about this :-(
- hessenwolf 13y ago3D printing? Drones - flying and driving? Robotics? CERN? Always on, location-aware connectivity? Quantum Computing? Automatic speech and text translation? Amazon-scale logistics calculations? Recommendation engines? How are we not in a goldener age of discovery now?
- foobarian 13y agoI appreciate your positive outlook :-) There is no doubt a great deal of technical advancement under way today, but it seems mostly applied, incremental work. Perhaps we're nearing the end of a Kuhn-like cycle of scientific advancement and some kind of breakthrough will kick things off again.
- hessenwolf 13y agoHow is automating driving incremental? Quantum computing? jAs a sometimes-Bayesian statistician - do you know the torment I will be able to unleash on the scientific world once MCMC inference is practically for free? Just imagine... spending all your time carefully choosing distributions for your data and uncertainty, and the implementation of the inference is an afterthought? I need a moment alone.
- yoodenvranx 13y agoPerhaps one reason for the change is also that finding cool and new stuff was "easier" 50 years ago. In my opinion all the low hanging fruits are already taken and in order to invent a new transistor you need more than just a few guys sitting in a room with little equitment.