This article - a retrospective puff piece - entirely neglects the circumstances leading to the loss of relevance of Bell Labs. It's explained in the autoposy of one of the greatest scientific frauds (fabricated nanoelectronic devices made of organic carbon materials e.g. pentacene) of the past few decades [1]:

> "For over half a century, Bell Labs had been owned by the telephone monopoly AT&T and had plenty of money to spend on science. But in 1984, the monopoly broke up, and after 1989, managers encouraged Bell Lab researchers to focus on research with commercial applications. Disenchanted, top scientists began to leave for universities and were mostly not replaced by new recruits. In 1995, ownership of Bell Labs was transferred to the newly formed company Lucent Technologies."

Then Lucent got hit by the dot-com bubble blowout, resulting in a 30% loss of share value in Jan 2000. This led to a new focus on PR:

> "By keeping up its practice of releasing exciting scientific findings, the lab could continue to demonstrate to investors, customers and anyone else that Lucent had a sound, long-term technological future. Again, this was a question of survival: with revenues falling, managers had to make the argument that their jobs and the jobs of their staff were worth keeping."

This led to a culture in which critical scrutiny of the claims of one fraudulent researcher was discouraged in favor of institutional cheerleading, and the end result was that 15 papers published in Science and Nature had to be retracted.

[1] "Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World" (2009) Eugenie Samuel Reich.

If you want a parable for what's happened to Bell Labs and many other scientific institutions in the US, it's that of the greedy farmer killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.