Previously, the lab was protected by an agreement between the US and AT&T where AT&T has a lawful monopoly but there were only so much it can earn and X% will always go to fundamental research, and that's why the lab was so successful.
That all changed when the federal government decided to break AT&T up in 1983. The for profit baby bells had no incentive to keep the lab and they proceeded to ruin it.
And, transistors are certainly cheaper and more reliable than the vacuum tubes they replaced.
Economics is still a factor in regulated environments.
You can get a good grip of what's going on in the lab in Brian Kernighan's <Unix, A history and a memoir>. It's a good read.
Anecdotally, I'm not a fraction creative or innovative when I'm desperate. My risk tolerance increases but that's a disingenuous measure of innovation.
profit, or economic surplus is a requirement for innovation, doesn't matter if it's private, or public spending, what matters is that day to day costs to operate a business or society at large are met before money is spent on risky R&D.
Every rational entity does this, you take your revenue, and spend it on necessities to sustain yourself (like food and shelter), sustain your income (transport etc), and then only spend the surplus on higher risk items (stocks, vacation, luxury foods etc).
If you were on an island, and grew your own food, I assume you would also follow the profit motive, keeping a healthy excess in production for a drought or taking Sunday off to relax, or fixing your dwelling.
We can have a rational discussion about how a company and society at large distributes it's profits, whether it's internally back to employees, R&D or explicit focusing on shareholder value, or using taxes to fund R&D.
But what I assume most people have a problem with is not economic profit, but prioritizing excessive shareholder profit, over everything else. Using shareholder value as an excuse to ignore the real needs of your employees or customers, or even the long term sustainability of the company.
We also have to remember that value is subjective, and when economists talk about profit, they're talking about something subjective. someone who collects stamps for fun, is profitable if they maintain a surplus of stamps. Just like one might buy GME stock to gain in something like social capital.
If you want to read a great book about when Bell Labs was really Bell Labs:
> We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more.
1-click was hardly an "invention" IMO, the Kindle was "just another e-book reader" (arguably the best, but they did not "invent" the concept), Alexa is a Siri clone, and so forth.
Only "infrastructure cloud computing" is something there Amazon really took the lead and invented stuff. Not a small thing, but also hardly worthy of the bold claim in the article. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and many other companies seem to have done more invention than Amazon.
"I'm going to patent shopping".
Of course, all this if Amazon has actually invented that and I am not just misinformed.
Some parts of the continental United States, mostly in large coastal cities.
Amazon’s secret sauce is in their operational efficiencies and logistics. AWS is great but utility computing conceptually it’s a mainframe bureau from the 1970s.
Well, it is according to the US Patent Office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent), and unfortunately that's the only opinion that counts in this case (at least as far as the US is concerned)
> I don’t know of another company
He didn't say contemporary company.
It's funny how many people on this page are having trouble acknowledging that this is a prevaricating puff piece. He wants to tell a story of his success, and leave in a way that doesn't tank the stock. So he lies a bit about the origin of the company, lies a bit more about their accomplishments, and so on.
I'm not protecting him, this is more like a PR stunt rather than a letter to his employees. Given the history, I can safely say that he might not care _that much_ as shown in this open letter
Jeff Bezos bragging about this is for sure illustrative of the dissonance billionaires have over the value of their companies.
But I still remember first using the iPhone 3G in 2008 and how it felt like magic to control a device with my fingers, to zoom into a photo with a simple gesture.
I wonder what technology will make them (and me too!) feel like this. Perhaps an electric car? I've never driven (or even been in one) but from what I hear they're much quieter. Maybe it'll feel like magic if I ever get one.
I tend to look at Amazon and Apple and wonder. Both of them are valued at trillion dollars but the path couldn't have been more different. Apple being very deliberate, very long term, sometimes decade or more long, planning. Amazon on the other hand, hundreds of experiments, most fail and some succeed spectacularly. I remember an Amazon exec comparing these experiments to Cambrian explosion and I think it beautifully captures Amazon's DNA.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/03/jeff-bezo...
* public cloud computing -- Amazon got it to work in a scalable and secure way.
* S3 object storage
* Dynamo -- A distributed, key-value store that ended up in products from S3 to Cassandra
* Redshift -- First cloud SQL data warehouse with ground-breaking ease of use
* RDS -- Cloud relational databases
* Amazon Aurora -- Relational DBMS that pushes the log and store into a virtualized, replicated storage layer
They've been particularly innovative in applications related to data.
Yes, Amazon's services make things easier and in some instances cheaper. None of it was really inventive, though, and definitely not comparable to the list of Bell inventions.
I've heard the "it's not inventive" arguments like this from companies that tried to compete with Amazon. The one where I worked got creamed.
Come on man, that's just bs. From wikipedia:
> Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.