[meekaaku]

I dont get this idea of breaking big companies up is inherently a good thing. As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake. The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. Current Google only comes even close with their far out projects(that dont directly make money) such as their quantum computing/deepmind/boston dynamics(when google had them)

Besides, if one does break up google, you wouldnt have those divisions running.

If there are far more opportunities left by the wayside, some one is going to out compete them, ie Slack and Teams

[michaelt]

> As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake.

With the benefit of hindsight, the break up was performed in the most ineffective way you could possibly imagine.

Take a national monopoly, and convert it into seven regional monopolies, which don't compete on price or service? Then let those monopolies merge back into three companies?

Countries that addressed national telecoms monopolies with local loop unbundling and similar policies seem to have ended up with much more competitive markets.

[direwolf20]

The Bell breakup is the only reason we have communication technologies newer than $2/minute telephone calls or (for the same price) Telex.

Bell had one good side, that was Bell Labs. How was it funded? By overcharging the whole country for communications, pocketing 90% of the profit, and using the last 10% to find ways to lower costs to provide the service — cost decreases that would not be passed onto customers.

It was even worse than it is right now with the regional internet monopolies.

[usefulcat]

> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.

That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.

[xnx]

Google has come pretty close. Who knows how long it would've been before someone else came up with Attention is all you need.

[keeda]

And yet they sat on transformers until OpenAI kicked off the AI boom by actually productizing that research in ChatGPT. Though it's possible they were just being cautious, my uncharitable view is that they knew this would disrupt their highly lucrative ads business, which is always the problem with monopolies.

Also you're overlooking other top-notch corporate research institutions like Microsoft Research, which arguably are more "Blue Sky" in the sense they are not constrained to any current product lines.

[compsciphd]

IBM Research when IBM was basically a monopoly was also an innovation machine.

[waffletower]

> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.

This comment is as if "Attention is all you need" was never written and never funded by Google, and the cascade of related research that it inspired inside Google alone isn't considered either. The other Google accomplishments mentioned seem to be filtered to earlier than 2018 as well.