Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993)

Here's a PDF https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/3106703

TLDR: "Management feared that the availability of a recording device would make customers less willing to use the telephone system and so undermine the concept of universal service. (...) The fear took two forms. First, if conversations became matters of record in the same way as letters or other contracts, managers felt that customers would abandon the telephone for critical negotiations and return to the mails, where a slip of the tongue would not prove fatal. (...) Second, if conversations could be recorded, matters of an illegal or immoral nature, which some executives estimated made up as much as one third of all calls, would no longer be discussed by phone. (...) Although one might expect that managers would stress the economic half of this equation, in fact they paid far more attention to the question of trust and image. During this period AT&T had constant public relations problems, largely the result of antitrust investigations. Thus, the fact that magnetic recording might create a major upset with only a minor gain for a few customers who could afford to have their calls answered automatically was simply not acceptable for managers concerned with preserving AT&T's good name."

The 1947 anti-trust lawsuit was settled by the 1956 consent decree which forced AT&T to exit all businesses not related to providing a national telecommunications network and which also required royalty-free licensing of all patents. For example, the Westrex sound recording business for movie production was sold to Litton.

This undoubtedly reduced any appetite for deploying any customer premises recording devices which would be similar to recording technology used for entertainment purposes. In fact, telephone answering machines became popular only after the development of low cost Phillips cassette recording technology driven by entertainment markets.

Note also that the gating of technology into the Bell System from Bell Laboratories via Western Electric was by design. Bell Labs was set up independently of and funded by AT&T Headquarters and Western Electric. This allowed Bell Labs to research (AT&T) and develop (WECo) technologies independently of short term business needs in order to prevent the Bell Operating Company regulated monopolies from stagnating, and it also prevented the system from being disrupted by short term engineering hacks. What were wanted were big innovations, thoughtfully applied.

Resistance to technological innovation, often by commercial concerns, is all too common.

Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937) details numerous instances and methods of such dirty tricks, including specifically use of patents in obstruction of innovation, and is rapidly becoming among my favourite references to these:

https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

As Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is

That looks at cases of such opposition in several areas:

- Transportation

- Communication

- Power

- Metals

- Textile Machinery

- Agricultural Machinery

- Building

IBM's Watson Lab had the same role in preventing innovations from escaping and upsetting stable markets. Hiring up promising PhDs to prevent them working for somebody else, and keeping them busy not developing for anybody else, was its main purpose, so almost everything they did went straight to the shelf. In the '90s, IBM started taking things off the shelf.

Ironic that this article is on jstor

FYI I see [dead] by your comments. Maybe you have been hell-banned?