Minor nitpick: The company now known as AT&T is essentially Cingular wireless; they bought the remnants of AT&Ts cell network and the rights to the name.

This explains clearly what happened with AT&T, and its multiple acquisitions over the years:

http://videosift.com/video/Colbert-regarding-the-new-ATT

There's a lot more to it than the wireless piece. Today's AT&T was Southwestern Bell/SBC which as you said, acquired AT&T and switched names.

Thanks, didn't know.

Actually that is the company now known as AT&T Wireless. The company now known as AT&T was one of the 24 'Baby Bells' that were created when antitrust regulators broke up AT&T (the one that created Bell Labs) in 1984.

The company used to be known as SBC Communications but changed it's name to AT&T after acquiring what was left of AT&T (mostly long-distance phone services) in 2005.

Through a long series of acquisitions AT&T now owns 11/24 Baby Bells.

Sources:

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#History

[2]My grandfather worked for AT&T for his entire career and I've involuntarily listened to a minimum of 100 hours of company history throughout my life.

Colbert explains it in detail: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/955486/

ebaumsworld is still slapping their watermark on anything that moves?

And the now AT&T carried over SBC's senior management, with all their -- in my opinion -- bad attitude and practices.

Today's AT&T is not the AT&T of yore. Neither in its technical research, nor in its management.

*its name

AT&T spun off Bell Labs in the 90's as part of Lucent. Lucent was acquired by Alcatel. Alcatel shut down Bell labs in 2008.

And of the computer science and other researchers that were at Bell Labs at the time, many now work at Google.

And then they started patent trolling with the trove of patents they acquired.

Doesn't say that on Wikipedia, did I miss something? Looks to me like they're just shifting Bell Labs' focus from basic scientific research and focusing all research into computer science aspects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#2000s

AT&T also started and continued "AT&T labs" in 1996, which still exists, and was populated by many ex-Bell Labs folks.

That's not quite the same AT&T that everyone knows of today...

Bell Labs is long gone, and existed to appease the government about a monopoly.

This is about BIG thinking enabled by the unique org structure. Everything about corporate governance says this is a bad structure. But they still might pull this greatness off!

If any technology that was formed in AT&T labs that threaten AT&T's very survival or business model, they will certainly or did squash it.

And little things like Unix

and C

How long does a 100k+ employee company get credit for something a small handful of their employees did almost half a century ago? Not that C wasn't an achievement but . . .

The old monopoly AT&T wasn't just a company but presented itself as an American institution. They heavily publicized their Bell Labs inventions to help keep the anti-trust regulators off their back. Unix/C certainly benefited from this.

I take my point back as the AT&T of today is not the same as it was back then, but the fact that the company funded this research is what makes it admirable.

I'm sorry. What have you done for me lately? C and Unix don't count.