Comment by gkanai
14 years ago
I thought this op-ed was important because I agree with the author that companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook (etc.) get the bulk of the media's attention when none of what they do could have been done without the work that came out of Bell Labs. Real innovation is not done at Google or Facebook or Apple for that matter. Those companies are too tied to meeting quarterly results to invest in real innovation.
I think the other important implication is that the US doesn't have an entity like Bell Labs innovating today. And so we rest on the work that was done back then (cramming more transistors onto a smaller chip, etc.) vs. new innovation that would provide the platform for decades of future growth.
IBM has turned/is turning into the Bell and Parc of yesteryear. They've all but vanished from the consumers' eye, yet they're stil huge doing and licensing and all kinds of research and technologies all across the technology spectrum, from transistors to chips to software.
Do you have any real evidence to back that up? When Lou Gerstner came to IBM he all but said their innovating days were over. Since the 90's IBM hasn't come up with any new products, instead focusing on acquisitions. Their patent flow is full of business process patents.
and their technology products are aimed clearly at tying themselves into large govt/business service contracts (See "smarter cities" stuff).
Watson is a neat tech demo, but not much more. I've built parts of the technology in Watson independently.
IBM apparently still does a lot of interesting fundamental research, in their PR it looks like they've got a focus on materials science for storage and medicine and they do interesting data-driven work around health, population genetics work (out of Africa hypothesis as one example) etc.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressreleases/finder.wss?t...
It might not be Xerox Parc stuff, and a lot of the PR looks like fluff, but it looks like there's real stuff going on there...
Oh come on.
To support your point: Last week I attended a talk about how they are turning the technology behind Watson from winning Jeopardy to advising your GP.
It's hard to spot innovation while it's happening. While the transistor revolutionized our world, I'm sure few people understood it's implications in 1947. Similarly, investments that Google, Apple, Facebook, and IBM make now might seem either incremental (making an open OS for a phone) or gimmicky (driverless cars, HUD), but that's how research coming out of Bell Labs might have been viewed 60 years ago without the benefit of hindsight.
Popular Science in 1948 had an article "This Capsule Challenges Vacuum Tube" on the germanium transistor calling it a device that may spark a revolution in electronics, and discussing various applications like much smaller radios, better TVs, and improved telephone transmission. They point out that the future success of the device depends on its cost, but mass-production might be possible. Computers are notably not mentioned. Link: http://books.google.com/books?id=YCcDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA117&...
Agreed. Lets not forget that Google has X labs, and while secretive, we at least know they will pave the way for augmenting reality and self-driving cars. That's pretty innovative.
Well we may have less entities like Bell Labs but we still have the T.J. Watson Research Center.
I think of somewhere like DEKA as a small scale modern bell labs.