Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if anything can be considered successful when compared with Bell Labs. It is a very high bar to meet (given they mostly invented transistors, information theory, unix and c). The modern world is to great extent a byproduct of the experiment that was Bell Labs. Some laugh, and say that it was experiment that has gone awry.
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.
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.