Comment by scrlk

6 months ago

As an interesting counterpoint to the idea of "just hire smart people and give them a lab", Ralph Gomory, head of IBM Research (a peer of Bell Labs in its day) from 1970-86 said:

> There was a mistaken view that if you just put a lab somewhere, hired a lot of good people, somehow something magical would come out of it for the company, and I didn't believe it. That didn't work. Just doing science in isolation will not in the end, work. [...] It wasn't a good idea just to work on radical things. You can't win on breakthroughs - they're too rare. It just took me years to develop this simple thought: we're always going to work on the in-place technology and make it better, and on the breakthrough technology. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/VQ0PBve6Alk?t=1480

27 comments

scrlk

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bluGill  6 months ago

Every breakthrough needs many 'man years' of effort to bring to market. research is good but for every researcher we need several thousand who are doing all the hard work of getting the useful things to market in volumn.

  • leoc  6 months ago

    Speaking of which https://substack.com/home/post/p-115930233 :

    > John Pierce once said in an interview, asserting the massive importance of development at Bell:

    >> You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories…only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.

    • kqr  6 months ago

      It gets even more nuanced. As I understand it, Pierce was not great at the pursuing part and often managed to enthuse others to follow his ideas instead of doing it himself. So maybe it is only natural that someone like Pierce would notice how much effort it takes to follow up.

kqr  6 months ago

I recently read about Atari attempting to do the same thing in the 1980s (headed by Alan Kay, no less!) Market changes forced them to shut down the attempt a few years later due to lack of funding.

zamalek  6 months ago

What's the concrete data behind his assertion? I have no doubt he's correct about ideas being rare, but supply/demand laws would then dictate that those ideas are very valuable - if money is what matters to you (I suspect that money wasn't the top priority for Bell labs, but as always lights do need to be kept on).

cmrdporcupine  6 months ago

In the end the amazing research work done at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC and (to some degree) IBM Research didn't benefit their benefactors so much as they benefited the industry and arguably the world as a whole.

Which is a specific weakness of the model of capitalism we have moved into in the west during my lifetime -- the gradual defunding or deprecation of state sponsored planning and research means there's little room for improvements that travel across the walls of corporate ownership.

Instead this work is being done on the whole voluntarily in the open source domain, and is likely undercompensated.

Where companies cooperate on cross-company technical standards committees, it's often very painful and the results often dubious.

pydry  6 months ago

Who ever said that they should be isolated?

The key differentiator was giving them freedom and putting them in charge, not isolating them.

leoc  6 months ago

Eric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... Also, to be fair, "Areoform" did mention Xerox PARC once in TFA.) Indeed, overstating the uniqueness of Bell Labs helps to billow up the clouds of mystique, but it's probably harmful to a clear understanding of how it actually worked.

But the ultimate problem with TFA is that it seems to be written to portray venture capitalists(?), or at least this group of VCs who totally get it, as on the side of real innovation along with ... Bell Labs researchers(?) and Bell Labs executives(?) ... against the Permanent Managerial Class which has ruined everything. Such ideas have apparently been popular for a while, but I think we can agree that after the past year or two the joke isn't as funny as it used to be anymore.

  • whatever1  6 months ago

    ExxonMobil also closed this year the NJ based prolific Corporate Strategic Research center that among many chemical process related breakthroughs, identified the CO2 emissions risks (way before academia), and invented the lithium battery.

    • ab5tract  6 months ago

      CO2 emissions risks were already being discussed in the 1800s.

      Furthermore, Big Oil notoriously suppressed any hint of their internal climate change models from being published and hired the same marketing firms that Big Tobacco employed.

      4 replies →

  • smj-edison  6 months ago

    Just read that article you mentioned--I find the most interesting part of it is "system integrators," or those who intentionally pay attention to both the research going on, and the on-the-ground problems. It's fascinating how it mentions how they brought information back and forth, and even generated new ideas from all the connections they formed.

PaulRobinson  6 months ago

And yet I can list a lot of things that Bell Labs did that changed the World, and yet I am struggling to name even one that came out of IBM Research. I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying that work didn't resonate as strongly.

  • scrlk  6 months ago

    Dynamic random access memory, RISC, relational databases, laser eye surgery.

    Less mainstream but significant: scanning tunnelling microscope, high temperature superconductivity, fractal geometry.

kmeisthax  6 months ago

RCA tried to duplicate Bell Labs' success and it arguably bankrupted the company.