[dekhn]

One of my favorite tech books is 'The Idea Factory' which covers various periods of innovation at (AT&T) Bell Labs, including the creation of the first real cell phone technology.

When I first got Pacific Bell (now part of AT&T) DSL in California in the early 2000s, it was run by a seperate division of the company, "Emerging Products Division". i always assumed that was because the traditional side of PacBell just didn't get digital at all and the leadership kept them apart to avoid the innovator's dilemma.

[gumby]

> When I first got Pacific Bell (now part of AT&T) DSL in California in the early 2000s, it was run by a seperate division of the company, "Emerging Products Division". i always assumed that was because the traditional side of PacBell just didn't get digital at all and the leadership kept them apart to avoid the innovator's dilemma.

This technique had previously been used by IBM to the the PC out: they built a whole division from scratch in Boca Raton away from the IBM mother ship in NY

[ianai]

I definitely wish more recent tech had gone the standardized way similar to how IBM standardized computer building. We’re into four decades of being able to build PCs from customized/off the shelf parts because IBM didn’t go the “make it impossible”/proprietary route.

[gumby]

Actually that credit goes to COMPAQ. IBM used commodity parts to save money but it was COMPAQ who famously cloned the BIOS a and made IBM-alikes against IBM’s wishes.

But by then the cat was out of the bag: IBM tried to achieve a proprietary beachhead with Micro Channel (and OS/2) but that added value for IBM, not the customer.

[com2kid]

Don't forget that Microsoft maintained momentum in this area. MS loved having open standards because it let MS pit OEMs against each other, causing hardware prices to drop while Windows license prices stayed the same.

[flir]

This is why at one point all the big players in open source were hardware manufacturers. The software tries to commoditize the hardware, and the hardware tries to commoditize the software.

[effingwewt]

Definitely going to give that a read. Now that you both mention it, many BigCo's did have fragmented segments back then, were I suppose now everything is helmed by the head (Alphabet/Google).

Maybe it was some kind of turning point. Also about that time did CEO age drop through the floor? They went from all being ancient to mostly 40 and under somewhere along the line.

Thanks for the book suggestion!