Bell Labs Holmdel Complex (2019)

I can't speak for the previous commenter but it does seem there is a different character to the research work happening at FAANG-scale companies (which is still generally in service of their corporate strategy) vs the work that happened at Bell Labs back in the day (which was more abstract and less directly-commercializable). Bell Labs was more of a large team of brilliant researchers with ample resources to support their work, and it just had to be useful to somebody rather than be part of a product/service that could be sold directly.

None of these efforts are as wide-ranging as AT&T's, though. Budget comparisons are hard for a number of reasons (AT&T had R&D happening in multiple places, under multiple funding streams, both directly and indirectly funded), but the usual thinking is that AT&T spent a larger % of revenue on research than most, but not all, organizations today, with Google being a notable example of a company that beats it on % revenue to R&D (is this still true?). My suspicion would be that that comparison wouldn't hold if you factored in the directly funded DoD work but it's hard to say without some pretty complex digging through accounting records.

The more substantial point is breadth, though. AT&T research at its peak was more comparable to a university than an industrial R&D institution, with both basic and applied research occurring in a huge variety of fields---likely all fields of physical science at various points. All of the organizations you mention are essentially single-purpose. Some of the major tech companies (Google, Microsoft) are known for wide-ranging R&D, but they seem to have struggled to produce the kind of basic advances that AT&T did, and also seem to be backing off of that work.

Basic research is the big problem... AT&T had very little problem with money going to basic research without known applications, likely due to the substantial influence that academia and "scientific management" had on AT&T, as well as its reputation for excellent research management practices that made AT&T a major part of basic physics research on the behalf of the DoD for decades (Sandia National Laboratories, for example, operated by AT&T until relatively recently). In my opinion, accounts of Bell Labs enormous success, having made major contributions to nearly every field of engineering, often focus too much on the excellence of its staff (which was a factor, although Bell Labs management practices were not exactly modern), and downplay the role of AT&T's willingness to fund basic research and ability to find outside funding for basic research as well. Few modern organizations seem to be willing to entertain major efforts in a nascent field of astronomy, for example, on the assumption that the technical work will lead to useful engineering knowledge.

There's a lot out there about the history of Bell Labs, but its own multi-volume "A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System," from the late '70s, does a good job of covering the incredible breadth and scale of work performed at Bell Labs. One thing to consider is that costs were quite a bit lower back then, and so Bell Labs small-looking budget of $3-5 billion of today's dollars per year translated to a workforce in the tens of thousands working, during WWII, 70-hour weeks. A two-day weekend did finally reach most of the Bell Labs technical staff early in the Cold War.

Besides, if you read into the history of Bell Labs, you will recognize vestiges of its bureaucratic structure in most government and military R&D today. Its influence in government and military physical research is enormous.

In high school I worked for Lucent in this building after school and over summers. It’s where I learned UNIX, vim, Perl, and how web servers worked. It bums me out seeing that it now is basically a big mall. Hopefully there are some cool startups that come out of it.

Tech was present in California in the mid-late 20th century; in fact, Silicon Valley was founded by an ex-Bell scientist named Bill Shockley, who shared a Nobel prize for the transistor. His company didn't do well, but ex-employees founded Fairchild Semiconductor, whose ex-employees founded Intel. This brought along many other tech companies, such as Atari, Apple, and the like.

Though Bell labs continued to innovate into the 70s and 80s, the AT&T monopoly was split up, which left Bell Labs with significantly less cash to invest into pure research with. IBM also lost the PC wars, ironically even though the PC became the international default for a microcomputer by the 80s and 90s.

So, yes, while tech moved west, the existing eastern behemoths had their own troubles which led to their downfall, independent of California. At the same time, Stanford became a major hiring location for these tech companies, and its engineering departments gained nationwide recognition. Companies moved to California to get access to Stanford talent.

Source - The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Fusion isn't a good example. It's not getting anywhere near the funding it requires. Maybe I've become cynical, but it seems like all the big new technology products which have come out in the last decade or two have just been software products mostly designed to predict human behavior more accurately to advertise to us. AT&T invented solar panels, the transistor, radio astronomy, as well as computing innovations that we're still using today. It's hard to imagine we'll hold Google, Apple, or Facebook in the same reverence 100 years from now because they created some interesting consumer products which distract us for a couple years before going in the trash to be replaced by the next, slightly more distracting version