[kippinitreal]

The difference is that Bell scientists were always focused on core business problems and not just chasing fantasies. OK sure, Shannon was doing whatever with mice and unicycles...but he earned it! All of Bells big accomplishments were tightly coupled to business needs: Information theory => everything, transistors => bad vacuums, fiber optics => latency.

Similarly Google has had huge contributions on "research" focused on their core problems: MapReduce, BigTable, Borg, BERT, etc.

[mjfl]

I think another very important component was that they were innovating in an area where they had a legal monopoly - there was no risk that their competitors would steal away their inventions. This is not the case with Waymo for instance.