Bell Labs was special in that (a) they were building the largest system known to mankind at the time (an effort only rivaled by Manhattan snd Apollo projects) where they (b) couldn't use standard components but had to invent every piece by themselves, from the cables to amplifiers to satellites and lasers. Furthermore they were (c) very special in that they helped the government on certain projects like Manhattan, got a decades-long minopoly in return, and had to make their patent portfolio publicly available. In other words they were a semi-public organization with a very well-defined goal, that of building and optimizing the telephony system. Only when it became clear that a monopoly was no longer needed due to advances in technology did Bell lose its privileges, and with it Bell Labs started to wither. It does seem to be a pattern that companies that have created monopolies tend to use their excess money to start showing behaviors of a public service. Namely the research departments of Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, Google and now facebook all come from current or former (quasi-)monopolies.

Peter Thiel wrote an article along these lines..

http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l...

"A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world. Google's motto—"Don't be evil"—is in part a branding ploy, but it is also characteristic of a kind of business that is successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't"

But Google had its culture before it got rich didn't it?

There are also a lot of small tech companies like 37 signals and fog creak that try to be ethical and and treat their employees well. I don't think thiel could argue that they are monopolies.

Nor frankly do I buy that Google is a monopoly. But that's beside the point.

And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it.

Much like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (inventors of the mouse, GUI, and object oriented programming), which Xerox failed to profit from.

> And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it.

I get that point. We're all interested in building great and successful companies on here, so of course it's a bummer when there is success from one perspective, but the whole thing kinda doesn't work out overall.

But I also want to ask: As a society, don't we benefit so much from any advancements made in the open, through publicly shared research as well as the open source movement, that sometimes we would do well to just bask in the glory of those advancements and never mind what individual entities (financially, structurally) stuck around or not, profited or not, in the procuring of said advancements?

It's also very clear of course that it is beneficial to look at the past in a discerning way, learn from it, make it better now and in the future. Still, there's something about the thought in the paragraph above that I wanted to bring up.

I just meant that, in the context of this post, and given the poor history of corporate research turning into corporate profits, I can understand Apple's reluctance to fund blue sky research.

I do admire a company that contributes in that way, recognizing that it's a contribution to humanity rather than investment for future profits.

>... (inventors of the mouse, GUI, and object oriented programming),

Xerox PARC had a number of notable inventions and they created the Alto computer which had a bitmapped screen with the desktop metaphor, but they did not invent the mouse or object oriented programming.

In terms of the computer mouse:

>...Independently, Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) invented his first mouse prototype in the 1960s with the assistance of his lead engineer Bill English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse

In regards to object oriented programming:

>...Simula (1967) is generally accepted as being the first language with the primary features of an object-oriented language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming

Xerox failed to profit from them because their management wasn't able to identify the amazing inventions made in their company. It is similar to what they say about Tesla, "when his generation wanted electric toasters, he invented electric cars and wireless electricity"

Xerox failed to profit directly, because the Alto was designed as a hyped-up minicomputer to compete with systems from DEC and IBM - a reasonable choice, because that's what business computing looked like back then.

Xerox didn't lack the commercial understanding to sell Alto+spinoffs, it lacked the understanding to realise you could build a developer ecosystem to support your hardware and make it the de facto standard.

DEC and IBM didn't understand this either. Gates and Jobs totally understood it, which is why Windows became a business standard and the Mac became the only serious business/home alternative.

But Xerox still did okay, because the use of GUI software transformed office culture and made it much more visual - which meant very steady sales of copiers and printers.

Xerox's stock price climbed steadily through the 1990s while paper remained a thing.

After the dot com crash, GUIs and screens had evolved to the point where paper became non-essential, and Xerox never entirely recovered - although you can still find a few people who print out and file all their emails.

tl;dr Xerox did very nicely indeed from Alto etc in an indirect way, for at least a decade or so.

> "And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it."

I'd suggest that was due to the anti-trust case against Bell more than anything else. For example, I believe AT&T were forbidden from selling Unix direct to consumers for many years, leading them to licence Unix to other entities (in the business and academic worlds).

Which is why UNIX got widespread in first place.

I very much doubt it would have been adopted in such scale, specially for the then startups trying to start a workstation market, if Bell could sell it at the same prices other OSes were being sold.

Possibly, possibly not. Consider the competition Unix had at the time it was released. A cut down version could've also made inroads into the desktop market (for business users).

If it would be priced at the same level of VMS or mainframe OSes, I am not sure.

Plus maybe the Xerox PARC attempts would been more successful if there weren't a cheaper UNIX workstation as alternative, in spite how they managed the whole process.

> "If it would be priced at the same level of VMS or mainframe OSes, I am not sure."

Why would it have needed to be priced that high? We're talking about software here, the cost of reproduction is close to zero. It could've competed in the same market space as CP/M.

As someone who doesn't know a whole lot about Bell Labs, its history, how it worked, etc: Why and how did it produce so much great research output? What was different or special about Bell Labs? Answers as well as pointers to other material appreciated!

"The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner is a fantastic book on this subject. I highly recommend it.

They had an incentive to doggedly seek IP so that they could remain as entrenched as possible. They didn't plan on actually profiting from it in most cases, they just wanted to be the first ones there so that nobody else could be.