Eh, I don't think today's scene is altogether that different from back then. In every case you have a research organization tied to an immensely profitable main enterprise. The vast majority of the work force works on the "product" side and only a small number of researchers are doing blue sky stuff.

This describes Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, as well as modern counterparts like MSR and DeepMind. As always, only a very small portion of the work force gets to do blue sky stuff - the rest have to do the "mundane" bits of making money.

Let's not be fooled by rose-tinted glasses here - even in its heyday Bell Labs was small fraction of the overall Bell operations, and likewise Xerox Parc an extremely prestigious but yet small slice of the overall enterprise.