AT&T Labs vs. Google Labs - R&D History 199
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."
Hardly compare (Score:5, Insightful)
and then come the lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
And then comes a series of decade-long court battles over who invented what.
Take for example the Xerox PARC "Unistroke" patent. I happened to visit PARC before I saw the first PalmOS machines come out, and saw Unistroke in action. Some conference rooms had wall-mounted "sign up" devices on the wall by the door, which offered unistroke entry. PalmOS comes out with a very similar "Graffiti" concept. Great fit for the idea-- arguably better than the whole-word recognition that Apple Newton was trying. Several years pass where everyone who was anyone learns how to jot down stuff in Graffiti. And then the lawyers got involved. Over ten years later, the dust is starting to settle, and for what?
And those who didn't enter their thoughts in one-stroke alphabets entered their thoughts with teeny two-thumb keyboards. Hm, that sounds familiar... RIM Blackberry vs who was that?
No matter which side you choose to support, and I think everyone's put forward good arguments for and against every conceivable angle, when it ends up in court, everyone loses .
Pure research is great. Xerox got burned in the whole Apple Lisa / Macintosh thing, so they sorta swung the other way with Unistroke. There has to be a middle ground, though. Right?
Ah, now those were the days ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I really miss school. Now, all anybody wants is results.
Re:Hardly compare (Score:5, Insightful)
Too early to tell. Let's check back in 40 years.
Re:Maybe they are not scientists but... (Score:2, Insightful)
So basically, they're nothing like patent troll corporations.
(Insightful? What were the mods smoking?)
Then versus now. (Score:5, Insightful)
The question today is, "How can we maximize our ROI?"
Once money becomes the driving goal above all else quality and innovation suffers.
Re:where's the tech? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is where you go wrong...Google is filled with some of the best programmers around. But programmers aren't scientists, and they certainly aren't the engineers one used to find in Xerox Parc or Bell Labs. Software is never going to be revolutionary. It's hardware that has us in awe. How can we possibly compare R&D of programmers vs engineers?!?
$7 Billion of R&D @ Microsoft Laboratory (Score:4, Insightful)
In 2005, Microsoft spent about $7 billion on research and development (R&D) [techtarget.com]. By 2008, the R&D budget will grow to $8 billion. If my memory serves, no American company spends more money on R&D than Microsoft.
The research division at Microsoft is the #1 industrial laboratory in the United States. To understand the magnitude of the largesse, note that Microsoft succeeded in convincing several tenured/tenure-tracked professors at top-notch private universities (e.g. Stanford University) to quit the university and to join Microsoft.
Like the pre-breakup AT&T, Microsoft is funneling its monopolistic profits into a massive R&D budget. Microsoft laboratory has become the "Bell Labs" of the 21st century.
Re:where's the tech? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say that Google falls more on the innovation/engineering side of things. I haven't seen much out of them that's really new knowledge; I guess maybe some of the ways that they're using AJAX or their AI stuff could be new, but mostly it seems to be new only in terms of application. Useful stuff, to be sure, but it's not like the transistor or the microprocessor; things that just fundamentally change how we work.
The dividing line between 'innovation' and 'invention' is always a fuzzy one at best, and I'm aware that there are lots of things which are neither one nor the other, and lots of innovative projects which contribute substantially to our collective body of knowledge just by applying existing tech in a new way -- developing new techniques, for example -- but I still maintain that there is some difference there.
Re:where's the tech? (Score:2, Insightful)
Google is hiring Computer Science Ph.D.s at an astounding rate. I guess you could call these people programmers (you'd hope they'd know how to write a program or two) but hopefully you'd also call them scientists.
Your second statement seems contradictory. Wasn't it in part the windowing systems and object oriented programming that made us excited about Xerox PARC? Is that not software?
Is a search engine not software? Yes, it's deployed on massive hardware, but it's a software application. The Grand Challenge vehicles are (in my opinion) primarily feats of software.
Re:Then versus now. (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies have always been concerned with ROI.
Some companies are just a bit more risk tolerance with the R.
Companies like IBM, 3M and Google continue to have good success with significant research.
I think it will remain a balance, right now we're heading into a very cost focused business environment as people talk about moving to low cost countries. The companies that manage to focus on their real strengths will be the ones that prosper.
IMO some companies don't need huge research investments, but I think this is becoming an increasingly small piece of industry.
Re:$7 Billion of R&D @ Microsoft Laboratory (Score:5, Insightful)
But here's the worrying part (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at every generation, and its parent generation and... you'll see that not generations were equal, as scientific progress goes. It goes up and down like a yoyo, and it did so since the beginning of time.
E.g., ancient Egypt must have started with some really bright minds, since they discovered a lot of things. And I mean including a ton of medical and other stuff, not just how to pile stones in a pyramid. Yet right before the macedonian invasion it was already at a stage where nothing much was invented any more. Medicine for example had been solidified into something that was religion, law and malpractice insurance rolled into one, and everyone just followed the same official texts literally, and never tried anything new. For _millenia_.
E.g., in Europe the golden ages of Greece and Rome were followed by what we call the "Dark Ages". It's not just that they discovered fewer things, it's that actually a lot of information has been _lost_ in that time.
E.g., take China. It was at one point one of the most technologically advanced places. They have a long list of inventions, including stuff from paper to gunpowder to trebuchets to crossbows (including the repeating kind) to the compass to god knows what else that they invented more than a millenium before the Europeans. They were _that_ advanced. Even their less glamorous stuff, e.g., the composite bow, might get less hype, but you can see its efficiency against European equipment and tactics when it was brought over by the Huns.
Yet then came an age of decline and it ended up with the Manchu Qing dynasty, where literacy actually decreased and the government was literally more concerned with enforcing a uniform haircut (yes, I'm not joking) than with any kind of science or technology pursuit. The Chinese army actually regressed from having _some_ guns during the Ming dynasty, to all spears, swords and bows during the Qing dynasty. That sad.
Or take Japan. Yes, now they're doing damn good technologically and have been even more impressive as progress goes during the Meiji Restoration. But before that they had periods when it stagnated or even regressed. E.g., the Heian period, also remembered for the rise of the Samurai caste, is also considered by some a time of stagnation and even regress.
So, yes, times can change. Sometimes for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Some societies fail to give those "mundane Joes" incentive to go and learn or research something. Yes, each individual can decide what to do with his life, but if on the whole it's a smarter or more popular choice to aim low intellectually, people may well do just that. And then stagnation and even regress follow.
Funding Pure Research and Hard Science Projects (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that such research tends to be very expensive and non-geeks just aren't interested in results they can't understand. The only reason we have nuclear power today is that the United States was willing to spare no expense to develop a bigger and better bomb in order to win WWII quickly an decisively. Nazi Germany sponsored a lot of good science and then took some of the results with military potential and did a tremendous amount of R&D to create amazing new military technologies...tech that just happens to have had amazing commercial potential. Jet aircraft and booster rockets come to mind.
You will hear NASA fans gripe because now that the Cold War is over, NASA has to justify whatever it does to the drones in government who get paid to eliminate government waste. NASA is no longer a great source of new scientific and technical knowledge, but it probably could be again. So could a lot of private enterprises if NASA and other parts of the U.S. government didn't have a practical monopoly on many interesting areas of research.
For major research projects to get significant funding now, they either have to have tremendous (and fairly obvious) commercial potential, or be extremely trendy, in a politically correct sort of way. No expense (to the taxpayers) is spared protecting "endangered species" that (AFAIK) have no real significance except that they are about to succumb to Darwin's Law -- despite all the bleating of the ecowackos, wasting money on the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker is not going to produce new knowledge or improve the chances of Man surviving another century. Having plentiful, cheap sources of energy would.
But try to get money on the scale of the Manhattan Project for the purpose of finally developing nuclear fusion power plants... That is not by any means pure research, but the amount of pure research that can only be done with the kind of energy a large fusion plant could produce is staggering. But why stop with fusion? Total conversion seems about as likely to be a practical source of energy now as utilizing light pipes and orbital spacecraft as the backbone of a worldwide communications network did during WWII.
Do you think the U.S. might have fusion power plants online and/or total conversion reactors in the lab by now if such projects had received oh, say $100 BILLION dollars in additional research funding since WWII? That's a Big Pile O' Money! It also happens to be roughly what the U.S. has wasted on handouts to Israel since that nation was created by fiat in 1948. Why not just cut all foreign aid for non-humanitarian purposes (Israel gets only about 1/3 of the U.S.'s foreign aid largess, after all) and use the proceeds to fund a pure research lab or ten that are operated by private sector organizations that have track records of doing cutting edge research and producing useful knowledge?
Stop real government waste and use the savings to fund hard science research projects that short-sighted bean counters consider waste because they know no better, ignorant touchy-feely nitwits in search of warm fuzzies and/or vote generating pork-barrel projects that they are.
Re:nothing left to invent (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead we get type systems that attempt to address device driver crashing and security issues - things that would never have occured if the OS research had been done correctly up front.
Some of the Microsoft Cambridge stuff is better, but where is the beef?
Re:Hardly compare (Score:3, Insightful)
Too early to tell. Let's check back in 40 years.
Why do you want to wait so long? Did the transistor not have a major impact on lives until 1987? Most consider the birth of the transistor to be 22 December 1947 at Bell Labs. I would dare say it didn't take but 20 years for it to show the promise of revolutioning society.
Re:$7B of (feeble?) R&D @ Microsoft Laboratory (Score:2, Insightful)
Xerox PARC is what I think of when I associate nearly pure R&D with the personal computing industry. Apple and Microsoft are just techno-leeches where Xerox PARC is concerned. Microsoft Labs seems to be working on incremental, evolutionary R&D projects based on concepts and technology from other sources that M$ simply buys (licenses). Pardon me while I yawn...
Re:Independence Day! (Score:5, Insightful)
step 1) liberals create federal regulatory agency, with mixed results.
step 2) "anti - big government" conservatives are elected.
step 3) said conservatives never actually trim the government, but merely underfund agencies create deficit and appoint people who do not believe in the agencies mission to head them. vast corruption occurs.
step 4) agencies stop regulating and start brokering favors.
step 5) bill clinton reduces size of federal government, but not nearly enough.
step 6) agencies continue to broker favors, appropriations bills divide pork among many industries in many states. these industries are now dominated by a few giant players, now dependent upon those agencies to keep their oligopolies federally enforced. agencies and broken regulations are now politically invincible since they were originally democratic causes, but now support industries purchasing the votes of republicans (and to a lesser but ever-increasing extent, democrats)
step 7) voters somehow continue to think that welfare is the largest violation of free market principles going, never call representatives to task on the issue.
step 8) innovation moves overseas to avoid competing with government supported change-phobic dinosaurs.
step 9) districts are redrawn to insure 97% re-election rate in the house.
wheeee! we're selling our future down the river!
History Lesson (Score:4, Insightful)
Having been to Bell Labs (Murry Hill NJ) and worked with some of the people when it was in its prime, I think the article fails to appreciate some history. First, AT&T is gone. And when it was recently brought by SBC it was a fraction of what it was.
Back in the day, there was AT&T which owned Bell Labs in Murry Hill NJ. This facility was the envy of every major company in the world. They did research in both hardware (physics, chemistry, integrated circuits, etc) and software (UNIX, C etc.) Of course they had their "feet on the desk noble prize winners" but the majority of the researches had goals that served the corporate interest. They did understand that fundamental science can pay off in the longer term, but today's short-sighted next quarter stock price mentality prevents this type of strategic thinking. For instance, AT&T developed in-house hardware and software because they needed a way to track (and bill) phone calls. They needed to understand fundamental physics and chemistry because deep sea cables and communication satellites are things that are not easily repaired.
Now what many people forgot, or don't know is that AT&T broke in two parts many years ago: AT&T Communications (took software R&D) and Lucent (took hardware R&D). Lucent took over Murry Hill as its HQ and AT&T Research moved to Florham Park, NJ. Lucent has since also spun off Agrere. AT&T sold their wireless business to Cingular, and what was left at that point went to SBC. So saying AT&T of today (a renamed SBC) is has a powerful research arm is like saying Micky Heart is the Grateful Dead. They do good stuff, but the magic is gone.
As for Verizon. Their only claim to fame is the biggest tax bamboozle ever pulled off by a company [slashdot.org].
Re:Independence Day! (Score:1, Insightful)
no insight or analyses
Re:where's the tech? (Score:3, Insightful)
Only IBM remains (Score:5, Insightful)