Live data from Hacker News

Google is the new Bell Labs

davidlitwak.com

101–106 of 106 posts

Re: Google is the new Bell Labs

#101
post #7

Bell Labs invented fundamental technology like the transistor and the laser. I wouldn't put Google Maps in that league. They did not invent autonomous vehicles or wearable computers, though they have made strides in commoditizing the technology.

Nobody works in a vacuum (there's a bad joke about vacuum tubes there..)

Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the transistor. To quote Wikipedia:

The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor.[2] There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles

Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. To quote Wikipedia:

Simultaneously, at Columbia University, graduate student Gordon Gould was working on a doctoral thesis about the energy levels of excited thallium. When Gould and Townes met, they spoke of radiation emission, as a general subject; afterwards, in November 1957, Gould noted his ideas for a "laser", including using an open resonator (later an essential laser-device component). Moreover, in 1958, Prokhorov independently proposed using an open resonator, the first published appearance (the USSR) of this idea. Elsewhere, in the U.S., Schawlow and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work.

....

Gould's notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959. The U.S. Patent Office denied his application, and awarded a patent to Bell Labs, in 1960. That provoked a twenty-eight-year lawsuit, featuring scientific prestige and money as the stakes. Gould won his first minor patent in 1977, yet it was not until 1987 that he won the first significant patent lawsuit victory, when a Federal judge ordered the U.S. Patent Office to issue patents to Gould for the optically pumped and the gas discharge laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians

Personally, I think the work Bell Labs did was incredibly important - much more important than the work others did. They were very, very good at taking half-assed physics ideas and publications and turning them into something useful.

Google is very very good at taking half-assed "computing" ideas and turning them into something useful.

Re: Google is the new Bell Labs

#102
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, Bell Labs' position as part of a state-regulated monopoly meant that the research created at Bell Labs was publically available. For instance, UNIX was given away, since Bell was prohibited from selling it. I doubt that Google's research will have the same public benefit; it seems much more likely that Google will keep it for themselves.

My developing theory is that monopolies can be great for innovation. What do ATT, Google, Xerox, and the old HP have on common? They are/were, if not outright monopolies, insulated from competition by virtue of network effects, brand or trademark monopolies, or simply a lack of competent competition. They weren't like the Acers of world, in highly competitive markets, struggling to make 1-2% profits on their revenues…

Adam Smith would disagree.

Re: Google is the new Bell Labs

#103
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, Bell Labs' position as part of a state-regulated monopoly meant that the research created at Bell Labs was publically available. For instance, UNIX was given away, since Bell was prohibited from selling it. I doubt that Google's research will have the same public benefit; it seems much more likely that Google will keep it for themselves.

Actually, Unix was made available only under closed-source license (most notably as "Unix System V" and its commercial derivatives, including AIX and Solaris). This lead to, among other things, a nasty lawsuit against the University of California at Berkeley, who eventually did make their BSD Unix variant publicly available, after carefully excising most of the AT&T-copyrighted code. Wikipedia has some information on…

Also, the ascendancy of Linux was a direct result of the fight between them. There was already a perfectly decent free UNIX - BSD - when Linux came out. However, the license wars meant that many corporations wouldn't go near it, because they weren't sure whether they'd get in legal trouble for it or if it would still be available once the lawsuits settled. Rather than deal with that uncertainty, people started looking at Linux as a completely free, from-scratch implementation.

Re: Google is the new Bell Labs

#104
post #75

Just because Google doesn't put as much work into keeping their future ideas secret, you can't assume Apple doesn't have equally ambitious ideas. You just won't find out about then until Apple thinks it is worthy of your attention.

That's assuming all the initiatives Google are working on are public.

No it isn't

Re: Google is the new Bell Labs

#105
post #35

I really don't understand the Apple hate boner. Apple may have single handedly jump started the mobile industry, and is the godfather of huge apps like Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram , Snapchat, Uber, Square, Candy Crush, the last few that have been causing major problems for major incumbents. Now what platforms has Google built that is changing the game for everyone else? You have YouTube and thats pretty much i…

Apple has extreme market influence and has been able to accelerate some developments (smartphones, retina displays, tablets, really small form factors etc) but those things would have been there anyway, maybe a couple of years later. They won't risk a flop product like Google Glass which is ahead of its time and dont really have a research program.

Product flops have real consequences. They scare investors off of similar projects, and set the industry back.

Re: Google is the new Bell Labs

#106
post #10

Uh, Apple created the Macintosh, the iPhone, and the iPad. I would give them a bit more credit for creating new industries if we're going to start comparing them to Google on that front.

Apple grew those industries they did not create them. Important, yes, but also by a large a safer role.

If you were to oversimplify the creation of the PC industry down to a single company, you'd probably land on Apple with the Apple II.

I'm also not sure which industry Google is supposed to have created?

Post reply on HN