That's like saying Microsoft could be the next Bell Labs. In reality, Microsoft is the next Bell, and Microsoft Research IS the next Bell Labs.

They probably are. There's a ton of interesting research going on at Google that is not being capitalized on economically. They just need a few ambitious visitors or ex-employees to "liberate" it, the way Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did to Xerox. In some cases (eg. TensorFlow, Chromium, protobufs, or LevelDB) it's already been open-sourced.

Note that neither AT&T nor Xerox were the prime beneficiaries of technologies developed at Bell Labs or PARC, respectively.

They've already done so much more than either of those.

Bell Labs delivered a fair bit of tech, but Xerox PARC did great demos. Xerox PARC == Magic Leap or something like that.

Don’t know why you were downvoted. Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc. But they got great tech which got ripped off, unlike magic leap maybe ?

> Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc.

Right, just because you haven't bothered to look it up, it doesn't exist. Here are just the Xerox PARC work that was commercialized by Xerox I can think of off the top of my head: Ethernet, XNS, Interpress, the Star and D-series workstations, Mesa, Smalltalk, Cedar.

Don't forget the laser printer, postscript, etc

The Learning Group at PARK did release Smalltalk, but guess that's not "for the general public".

I was under the idea they never really wanted to release a product for mass consumption.