<story><title>Why Google isn&apos;t our Bell Labs</title><url>http://begun.co/why-google-isnt-our-bell-labs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrochkind1</author><text>The Bell Telephone Company&amp;#x2F;AT&amp;amp;T was also a privately owned, publicly traded, company with an obligation to maximize profit to shareholders.&lt;p&gt;I think there are probably a lot of differences between Bell Labs and Google. Some of them are due to just differences in historical context between the 60s and the 2000&amp;#x27;s, some are probably due to how Bell&amp;#x27;s monopoly effected it&amp;#x27;s R&amp;amp;D approaches, sure.  It would be interesting to delve into this.&lt;p&gt;But they are definitely not about the &amp;quot;fundamental differences between a publicly traded company and a state-sanctioned monopoly,&amp;quot; the OP is just confused. Bell&amp;#x2F;AT&amp;amp;T was a publicly traded company, as well as a state-sanctioned monopoly.&lt;p&gt;Also, in the histories of Unix that I&amp;#x27;ve read, Bell&amp;#x2F;AT&amp;amp;T hardly &lt;i&gt;wanted&lt;/i&gt; to contribute Unix to the &amp;#x27;public domain&amp;#x27;, they wanted to market&amp;#x2F;commercialize it, they just failed -- and never really realized the potential market value of what they had.  There were also issues of AT&amp;amp;T being forbidden from entering some aspects of computer business by a 1950s antitrust consent decree. (The UNIX &lt;i&gt;developers&lt;/i&gt; on the other hand definitely wanted to share it, and often had to act under the radar to do so. Another historical difference is that they could get away with that.)&lt;p&gt;I think the author is perhaps guilty of romanticizing Bell Labs as they are accusing others of romanticizing Google!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Dn_Ab</author><text>Very true that AT&amp;amp;T was no saint but it should come as no surprise that Bell Labs is romanticized when one looks at how Epic their &lt;i&gt;output&lt;/i&gt; was. From a sample of their employees we have: &lt;i&gt;Information Theory&lt;/i&gt;, karnaugh maps, the transistor, laser, photovoltaics, CCDs, C,R, Unix and for kicks - stumbling upon CMB hence enriching our understanding of the universe, it&amp;#x27;s age and size. It&amp;#x27;s mind boggling. No company today comes anywhere near that in terms of fundamentally rearranging knowledge and society.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t often align like that.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;amp;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Google isn&apos;t our Bell Labs</title><url>http://begun.co/why-google-isnt-our-bell-labs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrochkind1</author><text>The Bell Telephone Company&amp;#x2F;AT&amp;amp;T was also a privately owned, publicly traded, company with an obligation to maximize profit to shareholders.&lt;p&gt;I think there are probably a lot of differences between Bell Labs and Google. Some of them are due to just differences in historical context between the 60s and the 2000&amp;#x27;s, some are probably due to how Bell&amp;#x27;s monopoly effected it&amp;#x27;s R&amp;amp;D approaches, sure.  It would be interesting to delve into this.&lt;p&gt;But they are definitely not about the &amp;quot;fundamental differences between a publicly traded company and a state-sanctioned monopoly,&amp;quot; the OP is just confused. Bell&amp;#x2F;AT&amp;amp;T was a publicly traded company, as well as a state-sanctioned monopoly.&lt;p&gt;Also, in the histories of Unix that I&amp;#x27;ve read, Bell&amp;#x2F;AT&amp;amp;T hardly &lt;i&gt;wanted&lt;/i&gt; to contribute Unix to the &amp;#x27;public domain&amp;#x27;, they wanted to market&amp;#x2F;commercialize it, they just failed -- and never really realized the potential market value of what they had.  There were also issues of AT&amp;amp;T being forbidden from entering some aspects of computer business by a 1950s antitrust consent decree. (The UNIX &lt;i&gt;developers&lt;/i&gt; on the other hand definitely wanted to share it, and often had to act under the radar to do so. Another historical difference is that they could get away with that.)&lt;p&gt;I think the author is perhaps guilty of romanticizing Bell Labs as they are accusing others of romanticizing Google!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>UNIXgod</author><text>The parent is spot on. Bell Labs was the first to leave the Multics project.&lt;p&gt;It took several years for Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy and Ossanna to get funding.&lt;p&gt;They did it under the radar with a PDP-7 garbage picked by Thompson while sending letter after letter to get funding for a DEC PDP-10 or Sigma7 which they would use to create the OS and play games&amp;#x2F;simulations (i.e. Space Travel). Mind you computer time in the late 60&amp;#x27;s was upwards to $75 and hour.&lt;p&gt;After all is said and done Bell Labs at the time was a government regulated national telecommunications monopoly and was not allowed to sell it. They could licenses it though and did. Berkeley only had to pay for the tapes since they where a school.&lt;p&gt;FWIW they didn&amp;#x27;t get the funding based on asking to program an unspecified OS but to create system specifically designed for editing and formatting text. The big buzzword back then was &amp;quot;word processing&amp;quot;. Also the higher ups already knew by then that they had something which Ken and Dennis had done on their own. AT&amp;amp;T bought them a PDP-11 and the first end user applications where for AT&amp;amp;T patent dept. to be used by secretaries.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Thus, during 1969, we began trying to find an alternative to Multics. The search took several forms. Throughout 1969 we (mainly Ossanna, Thompson, Ritchie) lobbied intensively for the purchase of a medium-scale machine for which we promised to write an operating system; the machines we suggested were the DEC PDP-10 and the SDS (later Xerox) Sigma 7. The effort was frustrating, because our proposals were never clearly and finally turned down, but yet were certainly never accepted. Several times it seemed we were very near success. The final blow to this effort came when we presented an exquisitely complicated proposal, designed to minimize financial outlay, that involved some outright purchase, some third-party lease, and a plan to turn in a DEC KA-10 processor on the soon-to-be-announced and more capable KI-10. The proposal was rejected, and rumor soon had it that W. O. Baker (then vice-president of Research) had reacted to it with the comment `Bell Laboratories just doesn&amp;#x27;t do business this way!&amp;#x27;&lt;/i&gt; --Ritchie 1979 &lt;a href=&quot;http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cm.bell-labs.com&amp;#x2F;who&amp;#x2F;dmr&amp;#x2F;hist.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Towards the end of the 80&amp;#x27;s Berkeley students took a nod from Richard Stallman and put their distribution on the net (which was mostly rewritten at that point (It was Keith Bostic who proposed removal of non-AT&amp;amp;T code)).&lt;p&gt;ATT UNIX was licensed at about $200k while the BSD patchset was just a piece of software you added if for anything the TCP&amp;#x2F;IP stack, vi, job control, curses, mail services and csh.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t for a minute believe that Google or ATT are in any way for the greater good of society and research any more than I would believe that apple or microsoft care about education and&amp;#x2F;or removing vender lock-in. It&amp;#x27;s not like any of the aforementioned monopolies have invested in real problems like cancer research and&amp;#x2F;or a cure.&lt;p&gt;If you want to explore the innovators it&amp;#x27;s best to look at the McIlroys, Thompsons and Ritchies, Bostics and Stallmans and so fourth who really did innovate and change our lives for the better.</text></comment>