The Bell Telephone Company/AT&T was also a privately owned, publicly traded, company with an obligation to maximize profit to shareholders.
I think there are probably a lot of differences between Bell Labs and Google. Some of them are due to just differences in historical context between the 60s and the 2000's, some are probably due to how Bell's monopoly effected it's R&D approaches, sure. It would be interesting to delve into this.
But they are definitely not about the "fundamental differences between a publicly traded company and a state-sanctioned monopoly," the OP is just confused. Bell/AT&T was a publicly traded company, as well as a state-sanctioned monopoly.
Also, in the histories of Unix that I've read, Bell/AT&T hardly wanted to contribute Unix to the 'public domain', they wanted to market/commercialize it, they just failed -- and never really realized the potential market value of what they had. There were also issues of AT&T being forbidden from entering some aspects of computer business by a 1950s antitrust consent decree. (The UNIX developers on the other hand definitely wanted to share it, and often had to act under the radar to do so. Another historical difference is that they could get away with that.)
I think the author is perhaps guilty of romanticizing Bell Labs as they are accusing others of romanticizing Google!
Very true that AT&T was no saint but it should come as no surprise that Bell Labs is romanticized when one looks at how Epic their output was. From a sample of their employees we have: Information Theory, karnaugh maps, the transistor, laser, photovoltaics, CCDs, C,R, Unix and for kicks - stumbling upon CMB hence enriching our understanding of the universe, it's age and size. It's mind boggling. No company today comes anywhere near that in terms of fundamentally rearranging knowledge and society.
I would argue that if Bell Labs was 8 or 9 on the Richter Scale then Microsoft Research, at a 4 or 5, is the closest we have today in terms of independence and diversity of research unfettered by profit concerns.
One guess for why Bell Labs was able to achieve so much is that on one hand they had decades of fundamental new insights by Brilliant physicists and mathematicians ripe for the picking (as evinced by multiple cases of identical independent inventions) and on the other hand they had the backing of a monopoly of incredible proportions. The planets don't often align like that.
Monopolies and excess profit are almost always a sign of market failure. However, some have argued that one of the benefits of a monopoly is it allows firms to reinvest some of that beyond normal profits and reduced costs on R&D (also typically argue monopolies are temporary because creative destruction). If you consider that only those like Google, Samsung, GE, IBM and Microsoft can even consider such broad-based research then it seems there is merit to the idea. Yet, the terrain of something so complex as innovative output should not have a single and global optimum.
Glad you point out that Bell Labs' gifts to the public domain were involuntary (they distributed unix source code without giving away the rights, then took them back; UC Berkeley then created a free replacement so they could keep teaching OS courses and At&T tried to sue them to oblivion and lost).
If you want to make the argument that Google isn't Bell Labs, it's probably better to point out that Google isn't really tackling really fundamental research projects like inventing the transistor and the laser. Even producing Go isn't on par with C because C was amazing and unique for its time, whereas Go is just part of a flood of new languages.
The parent is spot on. Bell Labs was the first to leave the Multics project.
It took several years for Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy and Ossanna to get funding.
They did it under the radar with a PDP-7 garbage picked by Thompson while sending letter after letter to get funding for a DEC PDP-10 or Sigma7 which they would use to create the OS and play games/simulations (i.e. Space Travel). Mind you computer time in the late 60's was upwards to $75 and hour.
After all is said and done Bell Labs at the time was a government regulated national telecommunications monopoly and was not allowed to sell it. They could licenses it though and did. Berkeley only had to pay for the tapes since they where a school.
FWIW they didn't get the funding based on asking to program an unspecified OS but to create system specifically designed for editing and formatting text. The big buzzword back then was "word processing". Also the higher ups already knew by then that they had something which Ken and Dennis had done on their own. AT&T bought them a PDP-11 and the first end user applications where for AT&T patent dept. to be used by secretaries.
Thus, during 1969, we began trying to find an alternative to Multics. The search took several forms. Throughout 1969 we (mainly Ossanna, Thompson, Ritchie) lobbied intensively for the purchase of a medium-scale machine for which we promised to write an operating system; the machines we suggested were the DEC PDP-10 and the SDS (later Xerox) Sigma 7. The effort was frustrating, because our proposals were never clearly and finally turned down, but yet were certainly never accepted. Several times it seemed we were very near success. The final blow to this effort came when we presented an exquisitely complicated proposal, designed to minimize financial outlay, that involved some outright purchase, some third-party lease, and a plan to turn in a DEC KA-10 processor on the soon-to-be-announced and more capable KI-10. The proposal was rejected, and rumor soon had it that W. O. Baker (then vice-president of Research) had reacted to it with the comment `Bell Laboratories just doesn't do business this way!' --Ritchie 1979 http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html
Towards the end of the 80's Berkeley students took a nod from Richard Stallman and put their distribution on the net (which was mostly rewritten at that point (It was Keith Bostic who proposed removal of non-AT&T code)).
ATT UNIX was licensed at about $200k while the BSD patchset was just a piece of software you added if for anything the TCP/IP stack, vi, job control, curses, mail services and csh.
I don't for a minute believe that Google or ATT are in any way for the greater good of society and research any more than I would believe that apple or microsoft care about education and/or removing vender lock-in. It's not like any of the aforementioned monopolies have invested in real problems like cancer research and/or a cure.
If you want to explore the innovators it's best to look at the McIlroys, Thompsons and Ritchies, Bostics and Stallmans and so fourth who really did innovate and change our lives for the better.
AT&T operated under the idea of a steady rate of return for its shareholders, versus simply maximizing the rate of return. So there was money to pay for the labs, each local bell operating company paid IIRC 1.5% of its revenues to the labs for the right to use the work they produced.
I may be a bit biased, because I'm a Googler... but looking through this thread and seeing all the people downplaying Google's contributions to Go, Android and Dart. As if they were minor...
But what about all of the papers that have changed the way the world does computing? Some choice links below:
Papers that have changed the way the world does computing? You must be kidding. A few thousand companies using (largely) poorly constructed products based on some papers is not changing the world of computing.
Bell labs created the first transistor for goodness sakes. The photovoltaic cell. The first gas laser! Wifi! TDMA and CDMA. The CCD. Hell half the concepts of modern operating systems came from Bell Labs.
Mind you, Bell Labs had 90 years to do all this, but to even pretend like Google compares is hubris.
According to Wikipedia, Bell Labs most notably contributed to the invention of "radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language". Google doesn't come close to such groundbreaking innovations [1]. Granted, there's not a whole lot of those these days but it can't be a coincidence that innovation slowed down at the same moment Bell Labs was downsized. Google doesn't help with that.
[1] MapReduce is probably the most important thing Google researched but it only helps with companies' computing load, much like AT&T's telephony protocol improvements we never talk about.
It's inventions like the Karnaugh Map and the MOSFET that changed how the world does computing. I don't mean to downplay the technical merits of BigTable or Megastore, but all they really changed is how salesmen sell things.
In reading The Idea Factory[1] it became incredibly clear that Bell Labs only released and licensed a great deal of this technology as the results of various antitrust settlements that plagued the company throughout its entire existence. Also, part of the role of the labs appears to have been to give the company something to "show off" whenever congress or the DOJ complained about the extraction of monopoly rents. I highly recommend the book, it was really fascinating to see the degree to which many of our assumptions about the functioning of the labs and its relationship with the corporation are in fact historically inaccurate.
Indeed "The Idea Factory" is a very good book recommendation. In the conclusion of the book the author argues that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute[1] may be the closest existing research organization to Bell Labs. While much smaller in size than Bell Labs it shares a focus on basic research and is well funded for the long haul.
Another theme of The Idea Factory is relevant to this discussion. The Bell System was the hardest thing people tried to build in the 20th century, and it couldn't have been done without valve amplifiers, transistors, information theory, satellites, and masers. Perhaps Google's technical staff won't become that good unless Google sets out to cure cancer, end war, or something equally ambitious. And they don't have to do it out of altruism: if Americans had to pay a trillion dollars a year for a war avoidance system, they'd be silly not to.
I think that is the point of the article. Bell Labs had to release their research, Google does not have to. Well maybe the author of the article should replace "state sanctioned" by "state tolerated" in his description of Bell's monopoly but the key point remains - the difference between Google and Bell Labs is (was) the government involvement.
Google, as a publicly traded company, has an obligation to maximize profit for shareholders — and there’s nothing wrong with that!
Why is there always this knee-jerk instinct to disclaim any critique of unfettered capital? It unhinges the basic thesis of his argument to say "there's nothing wrong with that." The claim is obviously that there is something -- albeit loosely defined -- wrong with it, which is why the comparison is being made in the first place. Let's feel free to have a real discussion about whether there's something wrong with the primary motive of enterprise to be maximizing shareholder profit, shall we?
Why is there always this knee-jerk instinct to disclaim any critique of unfettered capital?
As a dude that makes this disclaimer when trying to make a more subtle point, it acts as a sort of a preemptive dismissal to the just-as-kneejerk "SOCIALIST!" or "ENTITLEMENT!" critiques. A way to separate critiques of a business model itself from some saying "in this one context, this business model has some ramification that aren't so hot" is useful.
People say that to justify the "yea, capitalism!" statement that is about to follow. But it's not true. Google doesn't have an obligation to do squat, at least not legally (and most who claim this use the phrase "legal obligation"). Sure, the board can vote out some C-levels (maybe), but no one is going to jail. The next time you hear someone make that claim, know that what follows is likely as equally uninformed or follows an agenda.
And i think it's actually an obligation to look after the shareholder's interest, presumably under the threat of the top dogs being replaced. To my mind that's an important but subtle difference from the "legal obligation to maximize profits"
Under a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, AT&T (the parent organization of Bell Labs) had been forbidden from entering the computer business.. Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Indeed, under the terms of the decree, Bell Labs was required to license its non-telephone technology to anyone who asked.
AT&T made Unix available to universities and commercial firms, as well as the United States government, under licenses. The licenses included all source code including the machine-dependent parts of the kernel
So, while they did not actually release it to public domain, they got about as close as they could have without actually doing so.
Remember the GPL didn't exist until 1989. Also, I would speculate the generally free access to Unix V probably helped bring about the modern environment of open source, which didn't really exist then.
I like how people write blog, get tens of comments and feedback and yet they haven't done the simplest research required for saying something in public with this certainty
Google to Bell Labs is not an apt comparison. The better one would be Google to AT&T. Both Google and AT&T have components (like Bell Labs) that produce open technology. The author's omission of Go, Dart, and Android is glaring.
This article will look even sillier in the future when we're being taxied around in our driverless cars, after Google has had the decades that Bell Labs had to make its accomplishments.
I think the big difference is that Bell Labs did much more fundamental research: basic science, physics, material physics, semiconductors. Google is putting a good deal of money into R&D, into engineering research like the self driving car and now robotics, but not basic science the way Bell Labs was.
People seem to be bringing up Go, Dart, Android as things to debate over, but there are some other potential things to consider, like MapReduce. In fact, I'd argue that MapReduce has had a far more profound impact than any of the previous three. It's hard to find a large-scale data processing pipeline that isn't essentially built on top of the principles that MapReduce began.
Do you really believe that? Map and reduce were available in FP languages in the 1970s! Yes Google have a nice implementation of doing it in a distributed compute cluster, but there was no new discovery there.
Surely everyone knows that the people who created UNIX, C, and Unicode are the same people who have created Go. Right? Ken Thompson? Rob Pike? You certainly know who these people are. Do you care what company they currently work for?
Ignoring the obvious difference in reach and success, in what way are Go, Dart and Android not equivalent to C, C++ and Unix in terms of open software projects?
* Go is just a less crufty C with a few niceties (modules, gc, coroutines).
* Dart, imho, is just an attempt to capitalise on Java expats, like they did with Android, but this time in the browser. It's sadly a much less interesting language than Javascript, which it aims to replace. It does however fit the bill of getting more enterprise friendly software running in the browser and in the cloud.
* Android is a pretty crappy Java runtime running on top of Linux. It's not at all interesting.
What all of these things lack in comparison to C, C++, Unix, and itself Java for that matter, is broad, industry wide repercussions. None of them are the culmination of years of careful research. If you look for the huge public-facing industry epochs out of Google, you're looking at marketing and social change, not individual technologies.
And yet Google does release a lot of stuff. They are doing a lot to advance the state of the art in day-to-day computing. Operating systems, programming languages, lots of stuff.
While this is true, I think Microsoft Research is much more akin to Bell Labs than Google (though I'm biased). See e.g. this list of top CS papers [1].
It seems strange how people will really jump on these sort of discussions. Are they more for entertainment? Do people feel like they gain a lot of information? Simply the fun of sparring? It would be cool to better understand. Maybe there's a business model here? Can't think of anything catchy.
The underlying analogy is hopelessly flawed. Google is all of Google, yet Bell.Labs was but part of AT&T. So when we speak of Google we get pure frontline business operations and sales teams and marketing departments and product support engineers as part of package. While Bell Labs is a jewel box containing fewer messy details.
Armchair expert articles like these make conclusion first and justify it later. Google has obviously given a LOT back to community. They had all the reasons to keep BigTable or MapReduce or GWT as trade secrets. On the other hand, Bell labs never intended all research to go to public domain. In reality lot of things "escaped" to public domain because they apparently did not saw any competitive benefit in them. Also saying that only Google is doing this is also purely false. FaceBook and Twitter has given back to community a lot. Similarly Microsoft Research has published probably more research (many times including the one that offered competitive advantage) than very likely any other company on the planet: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/science/publicati....
The Bell Labs Song [1] neatly lists all the innovations -- and the list goes on and on, ranging from physics and cosmology, through low-level electronics and programming, to systems and organization design and applied math concepts.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|12 years ago|reply
I think there are probably a lot of differences between Bell Labs and Google. Some of them are due to just differences in historical context between the 60s and the 2000's, some are probably due to how Bell's monopoly effected it's R&D approaches, sure. It would be interesting to delve into this.
But they are definitely not about the "fundamental differences between a publicly traded company and a state-sanctioned monopoly," the OP is just confused. Bell/AT&T was a publicly traded company, as well as a state-sanctioned monopoly.
Also, in the histories of Unix that I've read, Bell/AT&T hardly wanted to contribute Unix to the 'public domain', they wanted to market/commercialize it, they just failed -- and never really realized the potential market value of what they had. There were also issues of AT&T being forbidden from entering some aspects of computer business by a 1950s antitrust consent decree. (The UNIX developers on the other hand definitely wanted to share it, and often had to act under the radar to do so. Another historical difference is that they could get away with that.)
I think the author is perhaps guilty of romanticizing Bell Labs as they are accusing others of romanticizing Google!
[+] [-] Dn_Ab|12 years ago|reply
I would argue that if Bell Labs was 8 or 9 on the Richter Scale then Microsoft Research, at a 4 or 5, is the closest we have today in terms of independence and diversity of research unfettered by profit concerns.
One guess for why Bell Labs was able to achieve so much is that on one hand they had decades of fundamental new insights by Brilliant physicists and mathematicians ripe for the picking (as evinced by multiple cases of identical independent inventions) and on the other hand they had the backing of a monopoly of incredible proportions. The planets don't often align like that.
Monopolies and excess profit are almost always a sign of market failure. However, some have argued that one of the benefits of a monopoly is it allows firms to reinvest some of that beyond normal profits and reduced costs on R&D (also typically argue monopolies are temporary because creative destruction). If you consider that only those like Google, Samsung, GE, IBM and Microsoft can even consider such broad-based research then it seems there is merit to the idea. Yet, the terrain of something so complex as innovative output should not have a single and global optimum.
[+] [-] Tloewald|12 years ago|reply
If you want to make the argument that Google isn't Bell Labs, it's probably better to point out that Google isn't really tackling really fundamental research projects like inventing the transistor and the laser. Even producing Go isn't on par with C because C was amazing and unique for its time, whereas Go is just part of a flood of new languages.
Bell Labs:UNIX::Google:Linux distribution.
[+] [-] UNIXgod|12 years ago|reply
It took several years for Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy and Ossanna to get funding.
They did it under the radar with a PDP-7 garbage picked by Thompson while sending letter after letter to get funding for a DEC PDP-10 or Sigma7 which they would use to create the OS and play games/simulations (i.e. Space Travel). Mind you computer time in the late 60's was upwards to $75 and hour.
After all is said and done Bell Labs at the time was a government regulated national telecommunications monopoly and was not allowed to sell it. They could licenses it though and did. Berkeley only had to pay for the tapes since they where a school.
FWIW they didn't get the funding based on asking to program an unspecified OS but to create system specifically designed for editing and formatting text. The big buzzword back then was "word processing". Also the higher ups already knew by then that they had something which Ken and Dennis had done on their own. AT&T bought them a PDP-11 and the first end user applications where for AT&T patent dept. to be used by secretaries.
Thus, during 1969, we began trying to find an alternative to Multics. The search took several forms. Throughout 1969 we (mainly Ossanna, Thompson, Ritchie) lobbied intensively for the purchase of a medium-scale machine for which we promised to write an operating system; the machines we suggested were the DEC PDP-10 and the SDS (later Xerox) Sigma 7. The effort was frustrating, because our proposals were never clearly and finally turned down, but yet were certainly never accepted. Several times it seemed we were very near success. The final blow to this effort came when we presented an exquisitely complicated proposal, designed to minimize financial outlay, that involved some outright purchase, some third-party lease, and a plan to turn in a DEC KA-10 processor on the soon-to-be-announced and more capable KI-10. The proposal was rejected, and rumor soon had it that W. O. Baker (then vice-president of Research) had reacted to it with the comment `Bell Laboratories just doesn't do business this way!' --Ritchie 1979 http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html
Towards the end of the 80's Berkeley students took a nod from Richard Stallman and put their distribution on the net (which was mostly rewritten at that point (It was Keith Bostic who proposed removal of non-AT&T code)).
ATT UNIX was licensed at about $200k while the BSD patchset was just a piece of software you added if for anything the TCP/IP stack, vi, job control, curses, mail services and csh.
I don't for a minute believe that Google or ATT are in any way for the greater good of society and research any more than I would believe that apple or microsoft care about education and/or removing vender lock-in. It's not like any of the aforementioned monopolies have invested in real problems like cancer research and/or a cure.
If you want to explore the innovators it's best to look at the McIlroys, Thompsons and Ritchies, Bostics and Stallmans and so fourth who really did innovate and change our lives for the better.
[+] [-] nl|12 years ago|reply
Google has dual class shares, so the only people Google realy has to please are Larry Page and Sergy Brin.
[+] [-] Aloha|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmayle|12 years ago|reply
But what about all of the papers that have changed the way the world does computing? Some choice links below:
MapReduce http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html
BigTable http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable.html
Dremel Paper http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html
Chubby Paper http://research.google.com/archive/chubby.html
Urs Holzle on OpenFlow: http://youtu.be/VLHJUfgxEO4
Megastore Paper http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36971.html
Spanner Paper http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html
Granted, some of these will take awhile before having implementations outside of Google... but you can't deny the impact of this work...
[+] [-] Aloisius|12 years ago|reply
Bell labs created the first transistor for goodness sakes. The photovoltaic cell. The first gas laser! Wifi! TDMA and CDMA. The CCD. Hell half the concepts of modern operating systems came from Bell Labs.
Mind you, Bell Labs had 90 years to do all this, but to even pretend like Google compares is hubris.
[+] [-] devcpp|12 years ago|reply
[1] MapReduce is probably the most important thing Google researched but it only helps with companies' computing load, much like AT&T's telephony protocol improvements we never talk about.
[+] [-] _pmf_|12 years ago|reply
Is this a joke?
[+] [-] fear91|12 years ago|reply
One has niche uses and the other creates new industries and revolutionizes science. It's hardly the same.
[+] [-] gaius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luikore|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serge2k|12 years ago|reply
The biggest impact is Android, and that's revolutionary how exactly?
[+] [-] weland|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] googlemployee1|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stochastician|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/d...
[+] [-] atlas1j|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institute
[+] [-] thisrod|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ToastyMallows|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lvs|12 years ago|reply
Why is there always this knee-jerk instinct to disclaim any critique of unfettered capital? It unhinges the basic thesis of his argument to say "there's nothing wrong with that." The claim is obviously that there is something -- albeit loosely defined -- wrong with it, which is why the comparison is being made in the first place. Let's feel free to have a real discussion about whether there's something wrong with the primary motive of enterprise to be maximizing shareholder profit, shall we?
[+] [-] forgottenpass|12 years ago|reply
As a dude that makes this disclaimer when trying to make a more subtle point, it acts as a sort of a preemptive dismissal to the just-as-kneejerk "SOCIALIST!" or "ENTITLEMENT!" critiques. A way to separate critiques of a business model itself from some saying "in this one context, this business model has some ramification that aren't so hot" is useful.
[+] [-] mikestew|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craigyk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dadkins|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
Under a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, AT&T (the parent organization of Bell Labs) had been forbidden from entering the computer business.. Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Indeed, under the terms of the decree, Bell Labs was required to license its non-telephone technology to anyone who asked.
AT&T made Unix available to universities and commercial firms, as well as the United States government, under licenses. The licenses included all source code including the machine-dependent parts of the kernel
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix
So, while they did not actually release it to public domain, they got about as close as they could have without actually doing so.
Remember the GPL didn't exist until 1989. Also, I would speculate the generally free access to Unix V probably helped bring about the modern environment of open source, which didn't really exist then.
[+] [-] msoad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|12 years ago|reply
Wasn't it because of the state-sanctioned monopoly that Bell Labs released so much? I thought that was part of the deal they made with the government.
[+] [-] p4bl0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjt|12 years ago|reply
This article will look even sillier in the future when we're being taxied around in our driverless cars, after Google has had the decades that Bell Labs had to make its accomplishments.
[+] [-] lambda|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aiiane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sprslf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayd16|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nly|12 years ago|reply
* Dart, imho, is just an attempt to capitalise on Java expats, like they did with Android, but this time in the browser. It's sadly a much less interesting language than Javascript, which it aims to replace. It does however fit the bill of getting more enterprise friendly software running in the browser and in the cloud.
* Android is a pretty crappy Java runtime running on top of Linux. It's not at all interesting.
What all of these things lack in comparison to C, C++, Unix, and itself Java for that matter, is broad, industry wide repercussions. None of them are the culmination of years of careful research. If you look for the huge public-facing industry epochs out of Google, you're looking at marketing and social change, not individual technologies.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ansible|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvb|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html
[+] [-] melling|12 years ago|reply
"Why is ..." vs. "Why isn't..."
[+] [-] brudgers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auggierose|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cloudwizard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damon_c|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dexen|12 years ago|reply
Oh, and four Nobel Prizes.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfdnFOiXUU
[+] [-] ramsaysnuuhh|12 years ago|reply