<story><title>The death of corporate research labs</title><url>https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-research-labs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>legitster</author><text>Holdup. Lack of anti-trust enforcement is blamed (among other things) for the end of corporate R&amp;amp;D, but Monopoly breakup is exactly what killed Bell labs! 9 smaller companies weren&amp;#x27;t going to fund their own lab, and the only reason the lab existed was to find new markets to explore.
In fact, nearly all of the examples of successful R&amp;amp;D labs came from corporations that so dominated their industry they put money into finding new investments: Xerox. Kodak Eastmann. Google might meet this definition.&lt;p&gt;I think we also overrate the significance of the corporate labs. There are not a lot of successful examples where the host company actually profited from the invention. Just a lot that bungled them or prematurely killed them (like when AT&amp;amp;T almost invented the internet). Or snuck out accidentally (like the Xerox Alto).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>badrabbit</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not being too large that forced a split up but their anti-competitive practices and positions. The regional bells still were big enough to run their own research labs.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube.&lt;p&gt;The problem I think is how easy it is for large companies to acquire smaller companies. It&amp;#x27;s how they expand or enter a market, they refuse to be bothered to bootstrap a new org-unit. They just devour smaller, innovative and creative companies. Look at Google, they couldn&amp;#x27;t be creative and patient enough to compete with youtube so they gulp up youtube. It&amp;#x27;s the bigcorp M.O.&lt;p&gt;So why bother with R&amp;amp;D when you can just buy a smaller company that does R&amp;amp;D, tests the market and builds a brand for you? My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead. You become a cemerery of dreams and ideas. You become an IBM,HP,Xerox and AT&amp;amp;T. Once the damage is done it becomes nearl impossible to recover from.  I like IBM as the best example, they are doing superb amounta of innovation even today but look at all their initiatives lack any traction or competitive edge. They have a ton of smart people working on brand new areas of tech like quantum computing,but their reputation and overall culture has not been great. They&amp;#x27;ve been declining consistently. Look at yahoo, yahoo!! They had legitimate means to compete with google toe-to-toe,they relied too much on aquisitions as did Verizon that recently aquired them for a meager $4B.&lt;p&gt;In the end I blame all this on how publicly traded companies prioritize quarterly profits as opposed to multi-year growth. Acquiring bumps up the stock value for a while, spending billions starting from scratch competing or developing a new concept is risky so stocks go down.</text></comment>
<story><title>The death of corporate research labs</title><url>https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-research-labs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>legitster</author><text>Holdup. Lack of anti-trust enforcement is blamed (among other things) for the end of corporate R&amp;amp;D, but Monopoly breakup is exactly what killed Bell labs! 9 smaller companies weren&amp;#x27;t going to fund their own lab, and the only reason the lab existed was to find new markets to explore.
In fact, nearly all of the examples of successful R&amp;amp;D labs came from corporations that so dominated their industry they put money into finding new investments: Xerox. Kodak Eastmann. Google might meet this definition.&lt;p&gt;I think we also overrate the significance of the corporate labs. There are not a lot of successful examples where the host company actually profited from the invention. Just a lot that bungled them or prematurely killed them (like when AT&amp;amp;T almost invented the internet). Or snuck out accidentally (like the Xerox Alto).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>victoro</author><text>Anti-trust enforcement can take many forms -- breaking companies up is just one of the most extreme and obvious ones -- but often just the threat of action was enough since for a while the US government backed it up.&lt;p&gt;A big reason Bell Labs was created and perpetuated was because AT&amp;amp;T feared being broken up. Bell Labs was effectively a PR vehicle they used to show the US government that they were giving back to the community, and an excuse to continue operating as a de-facto state-sanctioned monopoly. Today&amp;#x27;s toothless FTC and DoJ don&amp;#x27;t really inspire that kind of fear.&lt;p&gt;Source (sort of, paraphrased) - This is a big theme of The Idea Factory which describes the heyday of Bell Labs.&lt;p&gt;(Edited to further develop my thought)</text></comment>