AT&T Labs vs. Google Labs - R&D History

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a piece looking at the history of corporate R&D, in response to an article on the BusinessWeek site essentially calling the telecommunication giants aging fossils of communication. The Ars piece looks as several innovations to come out of the AT&T Labs over the years, as well as the era of innovation brought on by the Cold War." From the article: "The Cold War, with its 'Pentagon socialism', combined with large corporate monopolies that were expected to provide lifetime employment and pensions, made for something of a golden age for American technological innovation. This is the era that brought us the transistor and the predecessor to the Internet, an era where all the seeds of today's 'information economy' were sown and carefully cultivated at great private and public expense. The great labs of this era--Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM's labs--were places with massive budgets, where the world's top scientists were invited to pursue "blue sky" research into areas with no immediately apparent commercial applications. The facilities were state-of-the-art, and there was no pressure from management or shareholders to do anything but science for science's sake."

Independence Day!

[neonprimetime]

Meanwhile, back in America, a perfect storm of rent-seeking behaviors by entrenched players, a broken patent system, a lack of substantial corporate oversight, and old-fashioned executive greed threatens to drown the fabled "two entrepreneurs in a garage" just as surely as those two guys helped sink the blue sky research labs of the Cold War era.

I love America. God Bless the USA.

Ahh... Nerdvana...

[bADlOGIN]

"there was no pressure from management or shareholders to do anything but science for science's sake."

You know the world of today sucks when you're nostalgic for your parents good old days.

What is *pensions*?

[drewzhrodague]

What is this thing (tilts head), pensions?

Re:What is *pensions*?

[darb_is_fat]

We don't get French Benefits?!

Re:What is *pensions*?

[hal2814]

I'm not sure but I'm pretty sure I've been getting emails telling me how I can make it bigger and/or longer.

Not a Digg title

[xtracto]

No, I refuse to think that is a digg title, the Digg story title reads something like:

OMG_HOW_GOOGLE_KICKZ_AT_T_LABS_AZZ_!!!1 [digg.com]

Re:Show Me This

[93,000]

Just a hunch, but I suspect that comparison will show darker times ahead for the U.S.

My parent's generation said the same thing about my generation 20 years ago, and we turned out . . . ah . . . um . . .

Shit.

Run for the hills.

Re:$7 Billion of R&D @ Microsoft Laboratory

[happyfrogcow]

"I spend US$7B in R&D and all I got was this lousy iPod clone"
      - T-Shirt seen in Bill G's closet.

Re:Comparision

[linuxlover]

But..but,

You can drag the map!...see how it moves...

And now try your scroll wheel, see how it zooms in/out... neat eh?

Hello.... Nobel prize...here we come.

*end sarcasm*

No comparison at all folks, move along....