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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.

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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.

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