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Comment by abadpoli | Hacker News Reader

There is an insane amount of innovation happening at Google and Microsoft et al. The amount of investment going into efforts like making data centers more power efficient, making better cooling systems, reducing latency or using fiber more efficiently etc is incredible and rivals the work done at Bell Labs back in the day. You just don’t hear about it because these private companies have no incentive to share it.

And that’s entirely separate from the fact that Generative AI wouldn’t even be a thing if not for the research that Google published.

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So if Microsoft discovered something very useful (e.g. new battery technology, or more efficient air conditioning system), but decided that it was something they didn't want to develop and market; would they share the knowledge or just bury it in case they might want to use it someday?

I imagine they would do something like this: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/datace...

These innovations don’t always have to be “marketed” to be shared. Things like this get developed and used internally, and then sometimes the company likes to brag about their accomplishments, even if it’s not an externally facing product.

Literally just watched an internal talk about this topic at work (Microsoft). Lots of cool internal research to make things better in every domain, but as you said, it won't be shared that much.

The Open Compute Project is great though, and MSR does awesome research across many domains too, as does Alphabet.

Was the Bell Labs Systems Journal shared outside of Bell Labs contemporaneously? I have original copies of the Unix issue, for example, but have no idea if that was 'generally available' back when it came out...

Without deeply researching the topic, my understanding is that Bell Labs didn't really "open source" everything or really most things. Just look at the later law suit over Unix.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix :

"Due to a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, the Bell System was forbidden from entering any business other than "common carrier communications services", and was required to license any patents it had upon request. Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Bell Labs instead shipped the system for the cost of media and shipping.

...

In 1983, the U.S. Department of Justice settled its second antitrust case against AT&T, causing the breakup of the Bell System. This relieved AT&T of the 1956 consent decree that had prevented the company from commercializing Unix. AT&T promptly introduced Unix System V into the market. The newly created competition nearly destroyed the long-term viability of Unix, because it stifled the free exchanging of source code and led to fragmentation and incompatibility. The GNU Project was founded in the same year by Richard Stallman."

I'm well aware of the history of Unix. My point was simply that Bell Labs was historically not a particularly open organization outside of the bounds that they were required to be by law.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/environment/deepmin...

do you happen to know why the tremendous progress at BL was shared (did it take a long time?) whereas the progress that happens at today's datacenters are mostly secret? I fear that no matter how much progress they make, if it's not eventually shared, it'll just be lost/wasted and others will have to reinvent it.

My take is that it’s related to the parent commenter’s thoughts on the relative monopoly that Bell had.

If you’re a monopoly with no practical competition, sharing your accomplishments gets you good will and has little downsides. But if you’re Microsoft, and one of your big moats and competitive advantage is the massive fleet of data centers you’ve been building up over the years, you don’t want to hurt yourself by giving your competition the information they need to build new, more efficient data centers.

There has always been a lot of good research happening in MS, but what we see as end-users are Recall, and the latest Bing news in Edge. Seriously, who are the PMs that allow this cr*p?!?

The ones whose KPIs depend on making it happen.

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