Comment by ThomPete

My guess is that what happened was the benefits of the monopoly like status vaned off.

We saw that here in DK when they privatized the state controlled telco here.

For a number of decades I guess since the 30s and up till around the eighties those organisations where stable enough with few enough "paradigm" shifts in technology that it would make sense to maintain an R&D division with a long outlook.

But after the internet revolution it's my guess that they couldn't maintain the 10 year horizons they often had the luxury to work within. The competition is now constant and the "innovation cycles" narrowed in which means that you will miss out on revenue each paradigm creates.

I think this is why ultimately places like Bell Labs and Rank Xerox makes no sense anymore.

The irony of all this is of course that in some sense it slows innovation down because each new trend is being sucked dry before the industry moves on.