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."
Show Me This (Score:5, Interesting)
Take those "go-getters" of the hey-day, compare the educational curriculum, pop culture, and political philosophies of their childhood to those of our children today.
Just a hunch, but I suspect that comparison will show darker times ahead for the U.S.
where's the tech? (Score:5, Interesting)
The same goes for Microsoft research: while there are some gems in there, you will see people presenting research on new ways for drag and drop and similar stuff. While that's useful, it's nowhere near what IBM, PARC and others were/are doing. Even Sun seems to have cooler research projects.
Either those next generation companies are not as scientifically inclined as the old 'dinasaurs', or maybe the truly amazing stuff MS/Google have is hidden from prying eyes till the market is ready for them
Then came quarterly reports.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:one of my dream come true and fade away... (Score:3, Interesting)
But as soon as the AT&T break up occured, all the money
were redirected to applied research.
Too bad. Had the BEST corporate library I've ever seen.
Science for science's sake... (Score:3, Interesting)
Jonah HEX
Re:google! (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like people who are coming out of grad schools now don't hope to get a position as a Fellow at IBM as much as they hope to get a big wad of funding from somebody (usually without thinking too hard about who "somebody" might be) and playing the startup game. Even though as a startup, you usually don't have much flexibility or opportunity to do research, it's all about productization.
I'm still not sure though that I would put Google into the same category as the old research companies of the Cold War era. Google's stuff is good, and it's definitely innovative, but in many cases it looks less like actual new knowledge development than just new and different ways of recombining existing stuff. That definitely has value -- don't get me wrong -- but it's different than the huge amount of capital investment and long time horizons that used to be the norm at Bell Labs, for instance.
Honestly I think it's the time horizon issue that's the worst part of today's market. I don't know if it's a product of instability -- nobody is sure what's going to be going on in 5 years, so they only plan for two -- or if it's just the desire to make short-term gains, but I think that we're starting to see the effects of lots of places not having a very coherent long-term strategy. Stagnation is bad, but a certain amount of predictability in the market can be good, if it lets people plan for longer, and thus take bigger calculated risks.
Nobody is willing to pay for research that might take 10 or more years to productize in today's market, and thus the burden falls on government and academia. They're basically some of the only institutions left that can afford to plan in multiple-decade ranges.
Comparision (Score:3, Interesting)
-Information Theory
-LEDs
-C/C++
-UNIX
-WLAN
-6 Nobel Prizes
Google Labs
-PageRank
-AJAX Mail Client
-Contextual Advertising
Re:AT&T Labs? (Score:5, Interesting)
But one other little known area they did work in was, of all things, economics. The Bell System Journal of Economics contained many ground-breaking papers on the structure, regulation, and pricing of utilities. One classic paper by Richard Posner in 1975 introduced the "capture theory of regulation". He wrote that when an industry is supposed to be regulated by the "public", which is represented by some board or trustees, the industry has an intense and concentrated desire to get the board to see things its way, while the public's desire to (say) have lower prices is more diffuse. In addition, the industry will have the technical and legal experts (and the cash to pay them), while the public depends on volunteers and/or screaming harpies with axes to grind to make their case. The inevitable result, he wrote, is the board becomes "captured" by the industry, and basically does what the industry wants.
Explains a lot, don't you think?
Re:Independence Day! (Score:5, Interesting)
i.e. the two guys in the garage predated the cold war and founded "blue sky" research labs, as did previous inventors coming from modest origins (Bell, Chester Carlson of XEROX, Edwin Land of Polaroid). Inventors create labs, Managers kill them.
Re:where's the tech? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Comparision (Score:4, Interesting)
You do not realize the significance of these?
PageRank is a method by which billions of related and interlinked pages of information can be searched across, that returns relevant results.
They managed to (nearly) tame the beast that the World Wide Web had become. The fact that they managed to do this using an almost sociological approach is all that much more amazing.
Which also represents a new form of interaction with threaded information. Not the most revolutionary thing in the world, but hey, technically the LED is just another form of light.
Which represents just one application of research into machine learning.
I am on a subscription mailing list for intern employees. Two topics that come up often are car pools and drinking. Google's contextual advertising engine is so smart, it starting showing me ads for DUI lawyers next to emails from this distribution list! That freaked me out a bit, Google's computers had managed to learn that this distribution list consisted of people who drove around a lot of drank a lot of alcohol. Woh. The fact that Google is using that technology to show ads does not make it any less impressive. As it is also impressive that Gmail knows when my GF sends me a short message "go see superman next Saturday?" Gmail asks me if I want to add "Going to see Superman Movie" to my calendar.
Google's research is rather limited in that they primarily (solely?) deal with information theory, but within their research domain, their findings are quite amazing. Indeed, others have tried hard in the past to achieve the same results, and others still try today. Ask.com has managed to pull off some pretty amazing stuff (which is then replicated by Google is, oh, say, about 3 seconds.
Re:where's the tech? (Score:2, Interesting)
Computer scientists are not scientists. They are at best mathematicians, but mathematics is not science, merely a tool that some sciences use.
Scientists investigate nature. Neither mathematics nor computers occur in nature. They are made things, artefacts, tools. Like all tools made by humans, they have laws limiting their scope (Godel's Theorems in mathematics, Turing computability in CS), and the discovery of those laws was a scientific process of investigating nature. But the vast majority of what computer scientists do today looks far more like either applied (sometimes pure) math or software engineering. The engineering component probably dominates since most applications depend fundamentally on the fact that a computer is not a Turing machine. Modern computers have a variety of capabilities that Turing machines do not, the most important being realtime interupts. Turing's theorems do not apply to such machines, which are fundamentally indeterministic.
The conceptually challenged will point out that the boundaries between science, math and engineering are fuzzy, and may go on to suggest that the fuzziness of the boundaries means there is no distinction. They are, of course, incorrect, as anyone who has ever crossed a road is aware: the finite width of the road and the existence of shoulders does not prevent it from having two different sides. I always wonder if the folks who claim not to be able to tell the difference between science, mathematics and engineering stand by the road wondering which side they are on.
So I do not think that Google labs or MS is a fair comparison to AT&T or Bell Labs. The latter were making discoveries about nature. The former are developing technologies for communication and computation which have a much more limited potential for creating new sources of power or other new technologies for disturbing the universe.
Re:one of my dream come true and fade away... (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is a long-winded way of saying "Carly Fiorina".
Most people forget that she brought down Lucent before she destroyed HP.
I worked at Bell Labs for a couple of years... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bell Labs served as the R&D arm of AT&T, Maw Bell, "The Telephone Company", a highly regulated utility. Because of it's monopolistic and legally protected position, AT&T back then through off copious amounts of cash, and was considered an exceptionally safe investment.
Bell Labs was funded by part of this cash flow and had an incredibly broad mandate towards basic research which showed up in the work people did, that often didn't have (immediate) commerical applications.
Unix, for instance - AT&T couldn't even sell it back then, due to their monopoly. But folks at The Labs kept on exploring, improving, conducting basic research into Operating Systems that we still benefit from decades later. My office mate at the time was working in fiber optics, and thought back then in 1984 that his work "might" have commericial telephony applications sometime past the year 2000 after the development of several enabling technologies.
Everyone was encouraged to present papers internally; every day there were loads of seminars and working groups during office hours and, of course, the informal meetings and brainstorming sessions that took place at pubs and strip clubs along the New Jersey coast.
Your manager typically was also doing his or her own research, and would help you to explore specific areas of interest that might not be precisely part of the department manadate.
Highlight of my time there: taking several lunchtime seminars in a new programming language called C++, presented by Bjarne Stroustrup himself.
I think Google with their model of lettign engineers do whatever they'd like one day a week is the best sustainable compromise between fully commericial companies such as Microsoft or Apple and pure research organisatins such as Bell Labs.
Short of government funded, open ended research military reseaerch - I did that as well, and while it may not seek to commericalise the research but they sponsors will have "other" uses in mind - it's probably the best thing we've got going for us right now.
I'll leave you with a toast that I picked up from some of the older engineers during my time at Bell. We used it during many an evening at the local strip clubs:
"Stronger Whiskey, Younger Woman, Faster Computers"
Ahh, the good old days.
MS R&D includes all product development (Score:4, Interesting)
The amount spent on "corporate research" is a lot less, probably no more than $100M, though that is a rough guess.
The other thing is yes, they've hired some great people. Lamport, for example. But hiring people because they did great work in the past does not mean they will do great stuff in your company. I've seen that in my own.
Re:Independence Day! (Score:1, Interesting)
Instant gratification and shortsighted children killed them.
This whole culture of kids running the world is irresponsible and devastating. They look back and say "See how horrible the big corporations and monopolies were. See how much damage they were doing, taking their time to deveop and test... ponder and pursue." We are forgoing the wisdom of experience and age, to satisfy a world ruled by pop culture.
We may or may not have developed our current level of technology if we had stayed within that model used during the cold war. But I guarantee we would have a lot more security in our daily lives.
TFA sounded well-reasoned and intelligent, until.. (Score:1, Interesting)