Despite that we have been fine.
Noting that, was Bell Labs really much more successful than a more typical research institution like MIT or NASA?
It is debatable whether NASA has made any great leaps of discovery or engineering over the last 3 decades or so. The Apollo missions were spectacularly successful (even accounting for setbacks) and we have a great deal of insight as to why they worked so well.
I have my own thoughts about why it doesn't work today (in the West, at least) but I'll keep them to myself because they are not organized and are likely to start a political debate or three in any case.
It is sadly political, because funding science and open ended research is now political, because that's the way modern politics has played out. I could point some obvious fingers here but no need to upset the easily offended.
In the UK at least, researchers have many options for research fellowships of 3-5 years, paid, many with total academic freedom to do whatever you like
My partner just got accepted to one after spending 3 months applying to 5 fellowships — an 8% ratio of application:research time.
In an Oxford or Cambridge college, you're working, eating and (for younger fellows) living in college with many other smart people. Sounds like a lot of cross-pollination of ideas happens there.
Perhaps in theory. But surely you're not going to get the next fellowship (or other academic role) unless you have shown some demonstrable output at the end of this one? That's still at least some level of pressure to try something safer but incremental rather than risky but potentially groundbreaking.
The most successful folks tend to mix talent and hard work with a bit of luck in terms of early gold striking to gain a quick boost of credibility that helps them draw other people into their fold (eg, grad students in a big lab) who can handle a lot of the metric maxxing to free up some (still not enough) time for more ambitious thinking.
The UK seems considerably better (much less bureaucracy and fewer hours of teaching) but still, you probably need to do reports and stuff on top of the grant applications.
Here, there are no product managers, barely any formal management, and a remarkably flat structure. Most of the day-to-day work revolves around filing patents, writing papers, speaking at conferences, and building rapid prototypes that push the boundaries of what's technically possible, often years ahead of commercialization. In some ways, it feels like stepping into a time capsule of what R&D used to be: curiosity-driven, deeply technical, and untethered from the usual metrics, as opposed to today's modern R&D miasma aimed only at sand-bagging products/results to nab VC funding and then cash out.
But the catch: our funding rises and falls with the cable industry. When times are good, we explore bleeding-edge ideas in areas like low-latency transport, advanced Wi-Fi features like Wi-Fi sensing, quantum-key distribution over fiber, and next-gen access networks. When times are tight (like now), there’s a sharper focus on short-term, directly applicable work — sometimes even jumping in to help operators troubleshoot real-world deployment issues. It creates this strange duality where one week you're working on a speculative 10-year-out idea, and the next you're neck-deep in production firmware because a partner needs help _today_.
It's a fascinating place to work, but it does raise an interesting question: can long-term innovation really thrive when it's so tightly coupled to a volatile and risk-averse industry? Bell Labs had Ma Bell’s monopoly cash to float moonshots. We’ve got a much leaner model, and the priorities shift accordingly. Sure, we've got Comcast in our pockets, but our R&D charter states that no one member can dominate our funding or priorities: we're split among hundreds of members and vendors, and they all seem coupled to one another economically, so if the industry takes a dip, so do we. I’d be curious how others in applied R&D spaces manage that tension between visionary research and near-term deliverables.
I think we massively underestimate just how much one simple fact, the absurd explosion of housing costs, have contributed to this. Take that away and just about everyone would have this kind of freedom. Look at just the gaming industry for example. Practically any great game from the past decade you can name was made in Europe or Japan; places that have kept these costs low relative to the rest of the West. When you don't have everyone terrified about how they're going to make rent next month, it frees up literally everything else. You can take these random walks and experiment when the cost of your existence doesn't necessitate bringing in huge amounts of income.
Instead of the efficient allocation of capital we have wealth transfers from producers and consumers to a financial rentier class that produces nothing. This class, which effectively owns the government and plans the economy, is responsible for not only high housing costs but high healthcare costs as well. It is gradually cannibalizing the rest of the economy and turning the population into debt slaves.
This is the real road to serfdom, which Hayek missed.
Unfortunately it was bought by another company whose management style was entirely the opposite and it became a shell of its former self and all the smart people left before me.
If leadership who set this policy wanted the same for themselves, then..
s/it was bought/it lost at financial warfare and had to sell/
Some companies with similar policy have lasted decades as an independent anomaly of success, some only manage a few years.
The corporate tax rate was much higher during the 1950s and 1960s [0], which would seem to encourage companies to invest in research to grow their business instead of giving the government the money.
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but it seems like it could be a factor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...
Why did Bell Labs die?
Why don't they pump out as much innovation today as they did in the past?
2. Bell Telephone doesn't exist. No, AT&T is not the same.
3. Since Bell Telephone doesn't exist, the money faucet doesn't exist to pay for Bell Labs.
4. See 1.
In short the fact that you can now make free long distance calls is why Bell Labs died.
I wonder if we'll see a similar change now that the DOJ is going after Google for antitrust violations. Google has been very open about publishing many of their innovations (like the Transformer architecture), not to mention DeepMind's work e.g. the protein folding work that got a Nobel prize.
https://1517.substack.com/p/why-bell-labs-worked
The original definitely didn't include lines like
> Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why Bell Labs Worked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 - May 2025 (234 comments)
Bell Labs came along a few decades after significant numbers of people and businesses started having electricity, running water, etc. It was a time when there was a particularly large amount of low hanging fruit. You only invent the transistor once. There also weren't a lot of other great places for those folks to go, compared to today.
azhenley•10h ago
leoc•10h ago