Comment by t-3

Can any modern company be said to be of similar size to Bell Labs in it's prime? Bell Labs were only possible due to a monopoly supplying massive amounts of funding for about a century. MS had a few decades of domination in the consumer desktop OS space, but they always had competition and I would be very surprised if they had the kind of revenue streams that make this type of long-term investment possible - regular payments from nearly every household and business in the country, with easy ability to make predictions about current and future proceeds just by counting heads.