At around 6/9/06 2:43 pm, raghu wrote:
>> By the times the 90s rolled around, outside of some small developments
>> in the hard science stuff, the Labs to some extent made itself
>> irrelevant with its outdated structure and "not invented here" attitude.
>> Hence the lack of significant Labs work in Internet technologies
>> (despite being the best poised for such contributions).
>
> Can you elaborate on this? I thought the main reason for the decline
> of Bell Labs was the change in focus towards "applied research" i.e.
> research that would payoff for *shareholders*, where previously the
> fruits were shared more widely. Rather than their structure being
> outdated, they were forced to change a structure that had worked so
> well in the past. A classic case of killing the golden goose.
>
I am not qualified to be a Bell Labs historian, so take my words as mere
opinion. Back in say 1994, the Labs still had thriving research
departments in esoteric fields like astronomy and mathematics (we even
had an astronomer out in the South Pole 6 months a year). Money
continued to flow like water and while collaboration with business units
was encouraged by management, it was not a blocking requirement for
research activity.
Most of the fundamental contributions in Internet technology, I would
suggest, happened during the 70s and 80s, at a time when the Labs would
have had even stronger funding and autonomy. Nonetheless, I can see
little contributions from its researchers, who woke up to this new
field/technology as late as the mid-90s. Perhaps the Internet and
related developments (protocols, standards, etc) were too pedestrian for
"serious research", but even that defence seems weak, considering that
similar efforts (communications protocols, text formatting, etc) were
underway within the Labs, around the same time.
At a time when openness and sharing was built around "rough consensus
and running code", Bell Labs was stuck in its old structure of isolation
and politics.
>
>> I must say though that behind the few amazing breakthroughs in science
>> and technology, the Labs also housed/funded/protected a large
>> non-productive population.
>
> And this is undesirable why? Is this not how research is supposed to work?
>
I am not sure I know how research is supposed to work. But it seems a
strange model to pay people lots of money to crank out papers and have
coffee room chats just because they obtained a Ph.D.
>> I appreciate and agree with the sentiments expressed about Bell Labs,
>> but if it was my money to hand out, I would, by a slight margin, favour
>> academic research as the recipient.
>
> Not sure that there would be much difference: the old Bell Labs was
> nothing more than an elite university like MIT.
It depends on how you date your Bell Labs. If by that you mean the Labs
of 30+ years ago, perhaps... I am not quite fully aware of that period
of the Labs. If you mean recent history, I tend to disagree (again, as
mentioned above, by a slight bit). MIT is a bad comparison for me, since
it is the home to the Media Lab and other stuff like the AI craze of the
90s. In those ways, perhaps it is indeed similar to Bell Labs ;-). On
the other hand, Berkeley and Stanford, even CMU (the non-AI parts),
would have, IMHO, done better things with that money. Also, academic
institutions, at least in some small part, fulfil the role of educating
the young, for the money that they absorb. I am at a loss to think of a
similar redeeming side to the later day Labs. Ok, I am being a bit harsh
with that bit, but in relative terms the utility does seem higher for
universities.
--ravi
--
Support something better than yourself: ;-)
PeTA: http://www.peta.org/
GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/
If you have nothing better to do: http://platosbeard.org/
