Well, as someone who actually knows about both the original Bell Labs,
the current Bell Labs (also briefly renamed AT&T Labs and also split
into Lucent Labs and Bel Labs) and Facebook, which until it moved to
new quarters, it was just a few block away from my home.
I want to expand this statement. It shows an incomplete knowledge of the facts.
-----
> *The AT&T company went through some fundamental changes and then the identity was essentially sold off (to people who then went on to destroy one of the company's biggest assets--the Saul Bass logo) so the current AT&T has just about nothing to do with this discussion.
-----
Saul Bass logo? As if a logo is what makes a company great? Anyone who
thinks a brand is a logo, well, .... Changing the logo was a small
side effect of a much larger change. It needed to be changed (see
below)
AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) had a monopoly on phone
service. They got it by arguing that phone was too critical an
infrastructure to allow it to be fragmented. At the time, different
phone companies would not interconnect, so you could only call someone
if they were served by the same company you used. The US Congress
granted them a monopoly with several conditions, among which were that
profits were regulated, held to fixed percentage of expenses.
Ah, the more money they spent, the more profit they made. Voila! Bell
Labs. Spend a huge amount of money on research and increase company
expenses, thereby increasing profits. Regulators scrutinized company
expenses to make sure they were not padded, but scientific research?
Oh, yes, that is essential. So the labs were given a huge budget. It
worked for everyone.
Many of my friends worked at Bell Labs and did brilliant research
because they had relatively unlimited funding and almost no
restrictions. No deadlines, no targets. As long as they could show
that the scientific community gave them high grades. In fact, some of
my friends did have one restriction placed on them: they were
explicitly told NOT to work on anything dealing with the phone system.
("We already do quite well there, so study something else.") So my
friends studied human reaction time, electronic books, radio telecopy
(a Nobel prize for this), developed electronic music systems -- the
very first and still the foundation of much of what is used today),
and advanced electronic circuits. They did hire the very best. They
did brilliant work. They got many, many awards and prizes, deservedly.
In 1974, the US government stopped the arrangement. telephone advances
were being stifled by AT&Ts conservative nature and restriction on
connecting "foreign" equipment to the phone system. So, no answering
machines, no computers, no transmission of music (unless you used AT&T
expensive circuits and engineers, which is what all the radio
broadcasting companies did -- AT&T's monopoly extended to
intercontinental radio and TV). Companies that wanted to enter this
territory were sued. But then the unexpected happened: a few of those
companies won their suits. And soon the clamor arose for deregulation.
The US congress finally reacted.
In the end, deregulation and splitting up AT&T was good. It unleashed
the wonderful advances that have led to many of the things we take for
granted today but that AT&T would not permit. But it destroyed the
funding source for BellLabs in the process.
No more monopoly and AT&T had to earn money like every other company,
which meant cutting costs. Most of my friends saw the writing on the
wall and fled the company. Some went to other companies, but most went
to universities (UC, San Diego --where I was at the time-- got some
of the electronic music folks, Stanford got the rest).
I visited the new Bell Labs, now called AT&T Labs, and the head of
research told me how he had to fire everyone who was not relevant. He
had to completely dismantle the radio telescope team, even though it
had a Nobel prize for its work and he was the former head of the team
and shared in the Nobel. That stuff was wonderful, he told me, but it
did not advance the company mission. He had no choice but to close
down that line of work. (The one positive thing he told me was that he
freely handed out copies of the Design of Everyday Things to his
workers, and he opened a cupboard door to show me a huge stack of
them.)
Another good friend of mine later on became head of AT&T Labs (and CTO
of the entire company), but by then, the game was over. I think it was
this person who got rid of the logo. But he should have. Logos
represent something, and the something that this logo represented did
not exist anymore. AT&T at the time was collapsing. In fact it did
collapse and a massive reorganization followed. But that is another
story.
====
Bell Labs was a wonderful asset to the United states and to the world.
But it was paid for by a ruse, a hoax, by deception. No profit making
company can afford to do this. Today, in high tech, only two companies
remain that does anything close to pure research, and even it is
mission guided: Microsoft (which as the top research labs in the world
in this area) and Google (which is still small and chaotic, but
getting better). Google has so much money that it can do anything.
This will change when the competition heats up (e.g., Microsoft which
has just awakened
(see http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/microsofts_rebirth_windows_8_on_phone_tablet_pc.html
) and Facebook, which will take over the advertising market if Google
doesn't watch out, and advertising is how Google makes its money.
The loss of the old Bell Labs was a disaster, but blame American
politics because it should have been a national lab, paid for by the
nation. Actually, good thing it didn't become a national lab. We have
a bunch of them. The US Congress gives it so many restrictions and
requires so many reports justifying their expenses and activities,
that they cannot hire the world's best scientists (with some
exceptions) and cannot do their work properly. The King is dead, and
there is no replacement.
==========
Facebook? Creative people, but their job is to monetize social
networks. (Facebook has hired at least one world-class designer --
Shelly Evenson -- whom some of you might know.)
Facebook just moved a few miles away to a brand new campus. Well, an
old campus: they moved into the buildings that used to be owned by Sun
Microsystems. Sun is dead, acquired by Oracle. (Google moved into the
old building that used to be owned by Silicon Graphics. Silicon
Graphics is dead, and nobody thought them worth buying.) Now Google
has outgrown those buildings so they are moving to a new campus on
what used to be called "Moffet Field," that used to be owned by the
U.S. Navy, right on the NASA Ames campus.
(My friends at BMW labs moved nearby and they complain that there are
no decent restaurants near them: they now have to drive to get lunch.
Why? Because Google serves such wonderful, subsidized food, that all
the local restaurants closed up for lack of business. But you have to
work for - or be a guest of-- Google to eat there. (I've eaten there:
it is overwhelming, almost as nice as the BMW cafeteria in their
headquarters in Munich.)
Bell Labs, AT&T, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Moffett Field -- all former
empires that rules their territories. All now dead. Tha't life.
Speaking of BMW, I've gotta go pack. Off to BMW in Munich.
Don (in Palo Alto, California, for the next few hours)
|
