[alayne]

Bell Labs invented fundamental technology like the transistor and the laser. I wouldn't put Google Maps in that league. They did not invent autonomous vehicles or wearable computers, though they have made strides in commoditizing the technology.

[hdevalence]

Moreover, Bell Labs' position as part of a state-regulated monopoly meant that the research created at Bell Labs was publically available. For instance, UNIX was given away, since Bell was prohibited from selling it.

I doubt that Google's research will have the same public benefit; it seems much more likely that Google will keep it for themselves.

[rst]

Actually, Unix was made available only under closed-source license (most notably as "Unix System V" and its commercial derivatives, including AIX and Solaris). This lead to, among other things, a nasty lawsuit against the University of California at Berkeley, who eventually did make their BSD Unix variant publicly available, after carefully excising most of the AT&T-copyrighted code.

Wikipedia has some information on the relevant history. As usual, treat with skepticism, but it will confirm the basics:

on System V: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V

on BSD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution

[nostrademons]

Also, the ascendancy of Linux was a direct result of the fight between them. There was already a perfectly decent free UNIX - BSD - when Linux came out. However, the license wars meant that many corporations wouldn't go near it, because they weren't sure whether they'd get in legal trouble for it or if it would still be available once the lawsuits settled. Rather than deal with that uncertainty, people started looking at Linux as a completely free, from-scratch implementation.

[alayne]

To be fair, Google's army of researchers does publish a sizable number of papers and participate in conferences. I don't want to make it sound like they are a vacuum or not contributing to human knowledge. I am just having issues with comparing them to Bell Labs.

[rayiner]

My developing theory is that monopolies can be great for innovation. What do ATT, Google, Xerox, and the old HP have on common? They are/were, if not outright monopolies, insulated from competition by virtue of network effects, brand or trademark monopolies, or simply a lack of competent competition. They weren't like the Acers of world, in highly competitive markets, struggling to make 1-2% profits on their revenues. They had steady sources of cash from products that had little market competition.

This allowed them to bankroll things like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Freed from living on the margin, they had the security to invest in blue sky projects.

[punkghetto]

What do ATT, Google, Xerox, and the old HP have on common? - They wer innovative market leaders of there time. They invested further in monetizing their successful business models. ATT&T has managed to continue to be a big player in telecoms and Google, much younger than the others is still incredibly relevant. But being a monopoly does not encourage innovation, although it can provide the financing. being a monopoly instead incentives protectionist behaviour to maintain the status quo 'cash cow'. Eventually however, unless protected by government intervention, monopolies fall or shift to new entrants. The only way to combat that is to look to the future and try and ride the next wave. Google's support of investing in 'moonshots' is really necessary to ensure they stay relevant, otherwise at some point they will become irrelevant.

[rayiner]

> They wer innovative market leaders of there time.

Since adding the "innovative" begs he question, let's rephrase it to "They were market leaders of their time." But lots of companies are market leaders. HP of today and Dell are market leaders of the PC industry, yet show almost no innovation.

My point is that competition, in the sense of the economic force that drives marginal profits towards zero, discourages innovation, at least in the short term, because it forces companies to be preoccupied with immediate survival, instead of allowing them to plan ahead to the future.

[Nimi]

I thought it's part of established economic theory that monopolies have an incentive to invest in infrastructure, as they are best positioned to reap the results.

Explains Google's Internet balloons, and many other investments.

[amitagrawal]

Adam Smith would disagree.

[nl]

But Google is (historically) a software company, so we should compare its contributions in the software field at the moment.

Here's a random list:

Page Rank

Map/Reduce

Statistical Language Translation

Unsupervised image feature extraction[1]

Go

Dart

Large scale software defined networking.

The list could go on..

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.6209

[iribe]

dremel(where facebook's presto comes from) bigtable(where amazon's dyanamoDB comes from)

Most tech companies have google to thank for large scale data processing. Google could have not published anything, but they chose to publish these papers. There are other papers published that other companies haven't even started copying yet, as google is 5 years ahead of the industry in terms of large scale data processing. When these companies get there, they can check out the published papers, saving years of time.

[nl]

Nobody works in a vacuum (there's a bad joke about vacuum tubes there..)

Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the transistor. To quote Wikipedia:

The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor.[2] There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles

Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. To quote Wikipedia:

Simultaneously, at Columbia University, graduate student Gordon Gould was working on a doctoral thesis about the energy levels of excited thallium. When Gould and Townes met, they spoke of radiation emission, as a general subject; afterwards, in November 1957, Gould noted his ideas for a "laser", including using an open resonator (later an essential laser-device component). Moreover, in 1958, Prokhorov independently proposed using an open resonator, the first published appearance (the USSR) of this idea. Elsewhere, in the U.S., Schawlow and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work.

....

Gould's notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959. The U.S. Patent Office denied his application, and awarded a patent to Bell Labs, in 1960. That provoked a twenty-eight-year lawsuit, featuring scientific prestige and money as the stakes. Gould won his first minor patent in 1977, yet it was not until 1987 that he won the first significant patent lawsuit victory, when a Federal judge ordered the U.S. Patent Office to issue patents to Gould for the optically pumped and the gas discharge laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians

Personally, I think the work Bell Labs did was incredibly important - much more important than the work others did. They were very, very good at taking half-assed physics ideas and publications and turning them into something useful.

Google is very very good at taking half-assed "computing" ideas and turning them into something useful.

[magicalist]

Whether or not the original comparison yields any actual insight, your comment is taking a nuanced view of the present (all inventions are incremental and end up sourced from many places) while taking a simplified view of history. Materials research was happening at many places beyond Bell Labs.

[rmason]

Commodotized it? Google's remote driving apparatus costs a quarter of a million dollars per car.

Less than ten years ago remotely controlled vehicles had a hard time driving in a straight line ten miles in the desert. Google's have now driven millions of accident free miles.

Granted they haven't tackled a Michigan snowstorm yet but I think you have to admit they pioneered this technology.

[alayne]

Much of the driverless car tech is from CMU and other universities who have been working on it for 30 years. Google hired several people from CMU and Berkeley. Are they putting resources into it and improving it? Absolutely. I just don't see them as being like Bell Labs here.

[magicalist]

Er, you know that CMU and Berkeley hired those people, too, right?

[vezzy-fnord]

Agreed. Bell Labs pioneered lots of essential breakthroughs in computing that we now take for granted. Google has thus far refined previously existing technologies.