Bell Labs invented fundamental technology like the transistor and the laser. I wouldn't put Google Maps in that league. They did not invent autonomous vehicles or wearable computers, though they have made strides in commoditizing the technology.
I doubt that Google's research will have the same public benefit; it seems much more likely that Google will keep it for themselves.
This allowed them to bankroll things like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Freed from living on the margin, they had the security to invest in blue sky projects.
Explains Google's Internet balloons, and many other investments.
Since adding the "innovative" begs he question, let's rephrase it to "They were market leaders of their time." But lots of companies are market leaders. HP of today and Dell are market leaders of the PC industry, yet show almost no innovation.
My point is that competition, in the sense of the economic force that drives marginal profits towards zero, discourages innovation, at least in the short term, because it forces companies to be preoccupied with immediate survival, instead of allowing them to plan ahead to the future.
Wikipedia has some information on the relevant history. As usual, treat with skepticism, but it will confirm the basics:
on System V: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V
on BSD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
Here's a random list:
Page Rank
Map/Reduce
Statistical Language Translation
Unsupervised image feature extraction[1]
Go
Dart
Large scale software defined networking.
The list could go on..
Most tech companies have google to thank for large scale data processing. Google could have not published anything, but they chose to publish these papers. There are other papers published that other companies haven't even started copying yet, as google is 5 years ahead of the industry in terms of large scale data processing. When these companies get there, they can check out the published papers, saving years of time.
Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the transistor. To quote Wikipedia:
The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor.[2] There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles
Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. To quote Wikipedia:
Simultaneously, at Columbia University, graduate student Gordon Gould was working on a doctoral thesis about the energy levels of excited thallium. When Gould and Townes met, they spoke of radiation emission, as a general subject; afterwards, in November 1957, Gould noted his ideas for a "laser", including using an open resonator (later an essential laser-device component). Moreover, in 1958, Prokhorov independently proposed using an open resonator, the first published appearance (the USSR) of this idea. Elsewhere, in the U.S., Schawlow and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work.
....
Gould's notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959. The U.S. Patent Office denied his application, and awarded a patent to Bell Labs, in 1960. That provoked a twenty-eight-year lawsuit, featuring scientific prestige and money as the stakes. Gould won his first minor patent in 1977, yet it was not until 1987 that he won the first significant patent lawsuit victory, when a Federal judge ordered the U.S. Patent Office to issue patents to Gould for the optically pumped and the gas discharge laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians
Personally, I think the work Bell Labs did was incredibly important - much more important than the work others did. They were very, very good at taking half-assed physics ideas and publications and turning them into something useful.
Google is very very good at taking half-assed "computing" ideas and turning them into something useful.
Less than ten years ago remotely controlled vehicles had a hard time driving in a straight line ten miles in the desert. Google's have now driven millions of accident free miles.
Granted they haven't tackled a Michigan snowstorm yet but I think you have to admit they pioneered this technology.