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Comment by scrlk | Hacker News Reader

As an interesting counterpoint to the idea of "just hire smart people and give them a lab", Ralph Gomory, head of IBM Research (a peer of Bell Labs in its day) from 1970-86 said:

> There was a mistaken view that if you just put a lab somewhere, hired a lot of good people, somehow something magical would come out of it for the company, and I didn't believe it. That didn't work. Just doing science in isolation will not in the end, work. [...] It wasn't a good idea just to work on radical things. You can't win on breakthroughs - they're too rare. It just took me years to develop this simple thought: we're always going to work on the in-place technology and make it better, and on the breakthrough technology. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/VQ0PBve6Alk?t=1480

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Every breakthrough needs many 'man years' of effort to bring to market. research is good but for every researcher we need several thousand who are doing all the hard work of getting the useful things to market in volumn.

Speaking of which https://substack.com/home/post/p-115930233 :

> John Pierce once said in an interview, asserting the massive importance of development at Bell:

>> You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories…only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.

It gets even more nuanced. As I understand it, Pierce was not great at the pursuing part and often managed to enthuse others to follow his ideas instead of doing it himself. So maybe it is only natural that someone like Pierce would notice how much effort it takes to follow up.

I recently read about Atari attempting to do the same thing in the 1980s (headed by Alan Kay, no less!) Market changes forced them to shut down the attempt a few years later due to lack of funding.

What's the concrete data behind his assertion? I have no doubt he's correct about ideas being rare, but supply/demand laws would then dictate that those ideas are very valuable - if money is what matters to you (I suspect that money wasn't the top priority for Bell labs, but as always lights do need to be kept on).

In the end the amazing research work done at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC and (to some degree) IBM Research didn't benefit their benefactors so much as they benefited the industry and arguably the world as a whole.

Which is a specific weakness of the model of capitalism we have moved into in the west during my lifetime -- the gradual defunding or deprecation of state sponsored planning and research means there's little room for improvements that travel across the walls of corporate ownership.

Instead this work is being done on the whole voluntarily in the open source domain, and is likely undercompensated.

Where companies cooperate on cross-company technical standards committees, it's often very painful and the results often dubious.

Who ever said that they should be isolated?

The key differentiator was giving them freedom and putting them in charge, not isolating them.

Eric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-k... came to a similar conclusion. (It did well here just a couple of months ago, too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295865 , so it is a little disappointing that the discussion seems to be starting from the beginning here again.) Another point which you've both made is that other big US firms had very important industrial research labs, too. (RCA Labs is one that seems to get little love these days, at least outside the pages of We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... Also, to be fair, "Areoform" did mention Xerox PARC once in TFA.) Indeed, overstating the uniqueness of Bell Labs helps to billow up the clouds of mystique, but it's probably harmful to a clear understanding of how it actually worked.

But the ultimate problem with TFA is that it seems to be written to portray venture capitalists(?), or at least this group of VCs who totally get it, as on the side of real innovation along with ... Bell Labs researchers(?) and Bell Labs executives(?) ... against the Permanent Managerial Class which has ruined everything. Such ideas have apparently been popular for a while, but I think we can agree that after the past year or two the joke isn't as funny as it used to be anymore.

Just read that article you mentioned--I find the most interesting part of it is "system integrators," or those who intentionally pay attention to both the research going on, and the on-the-ground problems. It's fascinating how it mentions how they brought information back and forth, and even generated new ideas from all the connections they formed.

ExxonMobil also closed this year the NJ based prolific Corporate Strategic Research center that among many chemical process related breakthroughs, identified the CO2 emissions risks (way before academia), and invented the lithium battery.

CO2 emissions risks were already being discussed in the 1800s.

Furthermore, Big Oil notoriously suppressed any hint of their internal climate change models from being published and hired the same marketing firms that Big Tobacco employed.

It really pains me that the people involved in this cover-up likely led lives of absurd luxury rather than seeing the meanest hint of justice for what they did.

People talk about climate change as though we're all equally responsible but this is false, there may be few saints on this subject but there's certainly degrees of sinner and these people are at the very highest level of blame in my opinion. How much of the world will be uninhabitable by the end of the century due to their lies delaying timely climate action?

There's a reason the wealthiest are building bunkers on private islands. The populace by-at-large remains blissfully unaware of the current consequences of climate change or what is almost certainly coming in the next several decades - when a critical mass realizes what has happened, the brother of mario kind of violence we witnessed this year will probably become commonplace. I don't see it playing out any other way, the level of current climate denial and gaslighting (even among supposed climate activists) cannot avoid reality forever.

Do you know of any literature that shows it being discussed in earnest before ~1905, which is when the newspaper article about it I've read was published?

1896 at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...

And yet I can list a lot of things that Bell Labs did that changed the World, and yet I am struggling to name even one that came out of IBM Research. I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying that work didn't resonate as strongly.

Dynamic random access memory, RISC, relational databases, laser eye surgery.

Less mainstream but significant: scanning tunnelling microscope, high temperature superconductivity, fractal geometry.

Two back-to-back Nobel Prizes 1986-87. That's pretty cool.

SQL, cost-based database query planning, transaction locking, … — System R.

RCA tried to duplicate Bell Labs' success and it arguably bankrupted the company.

I suspect the MBAs contribute in no small part to the bankruptcy.

Out of curiosity: is there a write up about this?

The Technology Connections video series on RCA's Selectavision CED home video system touches on this quite a lot (it was a horribly mismanaged project which took more than a decade to commercialize, by which time it had already been superceded by VHS/Betamax and Laserdisc)[1]. His main source for the information on the development of the CED system was the book "The Business of Research: RCA and the VideoDisc" by Margaret B. W. Graham.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA&list=PLv0jwu7G_D...

RCA's Sarnoff Labs produced the image orthicon, NTSC color TV, an early videotape system, an early flat-panel-display, and lots of vacuum tube innovations.[1]

The big business mistakes were in the 1970s, when RCA tried to become a diversified conglomerate. At one point they owned Hertz Rent-A-Car and Banquet TV dinners.[2]

[1] https://eyesofageneration.com/rca-sarnoff-library-photo-arch...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA

This seems to be the fate of many companies. Rockwell at one point somehow was producing the space shuttle while also having a division that made automotive components.

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