The History of Unix, by Rob Pike [video]

What fundamental research are they pumping money into, regardless of imminent commercial promise? What set Bell Labs apart was the level of fudnamental "Well, we have no idea where this will go, but we can afford to throw some of our monopoly money at it" environment.

The vast majority of people in the companies you listed are doing work that has nowhere near the density of interestingness that happened in Xerox Parc, for example. There might be individual departments in those companies that are comparable -- in Microsoft Research perhaps, and a sibling comment points out Alpha Go.

Anyway, the point is: Working at Alphabet or Intel or any of these is nothing like working at Xerox Parc, unless you happen to be in a very special place within those companies. But then, such special places are bound to exist elsewhere as well, in particular in small startups that are doing genuinely interesting things.

And I think the key here is the community actitute and ecosystem. The hole 'huge communities driven by the goal of creating good/the best possible technology and code' and not directly (I know big companies are in, but they still have to play the community game/rules) by comercial or political agendas.

There's nothing like it today, because the only vision you'll find in the current crop of smart+budget shops is how to make more cash from ads and/or the web.

Even at SpaceX, the getting-to-Mars vision is more than fifty years old.

PARC was about enhancing human creativity, cognition, and potential, and everything else came from that.

Not only is no one is working in that space today, but all the big smart+budget shops are more likely to pollute that space than contribute to it.