>You just described google 10 years ago. And I would argue they have been on a downhill slop ever since.
Don't forget Microsoft ever since the early 90s or so. And I would argue they haven't produced much usable stuff in the research realm at all.
So I think it's more than just #1 and #2. There's also a #3: a national culture where doing great things is seen as more important than simply maximizing shareholder returns. The US had that many decades ago when it sent people to the Moon, but it lost it sometime after the 1980s.
I'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of these giant companies took their trillions of dollars and said "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going to be pure research now! We're going to turn our offices back into a college-campus-like playhouse of innovation! We're going to hire the best and brightest again and give them amazing things to work on rather than improving click-rates by 0.1%! We're going to do only moonshots! We're not going to maximize shareholder value!" The stock price would go to $0.01 but it would be a paradise for researchers and developers.
It would be such a breath of fresh air from all of the dollar-maximizer companies that we seem to be stuck with now.
You need a playhouse of innovation, but you also need a pipeline of taking that innovation and making lots of money/practical applications. And you need the interaction between people doing practical work and feeling limitations and the playhouse trying stuff out.
Bell Labs worked because AT&T had huge field operations, a huge automation problem (telephone switching and billing), and a huge manufacturing arm for telco equipment and customer equipment, and a reputation for solving problems related to communication. Small innovations easily contributed to the bottom line, and large innovations enabled massive expansion of communication. Also, there's a huge benefit from research being connected to scale --- Bell labs innovations were likely to be applied in AT&Ts businesses quickly which informs future innovation; if you're an unconnected playhouse of ideas, it's hard to know if your innovations can be applied.
For better or worse, things are less integrated now. Telcos still have large field operations, but they don't usually manufacture the equipment. Automation of telephone switching is so complete, I don't know if there are any operators anymore. Billing for usage is very limited.
You see some companies developing the processors in equipment they use and sell, which is more integrated than when it was all Intel/AMD/Qualcomm.
As much as I dislike Elon these days, this is basically how all his recent companies have been setup. Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and arguably even Boring are all moonshots, the latter 3 being so anti-shareholder that they aren't even publicly traded.
There seems to be some amnesia about the sort of company AT&T was. AT&T was first and foremost a profit maximizer. They were the poster child for abusive monopolies. Remember until the 1980s, literally no one owned a phone. All hardware that connected to a phone line was owned by ATT.
> I'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of these giant companies took their trillions of dollars and said "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going to be pure research now!
If this alternate timeline where giant companies are autonomous creatures were to be, why would there be shareholders?
Because that's what was asserted to be in this alternate timeline. An alternate-alternate timeline could have no companies, sure, but the discussion is centred around a specific alternate timeline.
An alternate-alternate timeline might have companies run by LLMs, but the alternate timeline under discussion states that the giant companies act on their own accord, with their own dollars – which, again, questions where the shareholders fit.
The corporate tax structure was different back then as well. Much higher tax rates and it was far more difficult to simply ship your profits off to another more tax-advantaged nation. If the choice is spend the money hoping to find the next great innovation or hand it to your government and hope they do something productive with it, companies are usually going to choose the former.
Today, you can license your profits to Ireland or some other off-shore holding company and never have to choose.
Other than Haskell, OSes in memory safe languagess whose System C# and Bartok features starting arring in .NET Native and .NET Core, Haskell contributions, plenty of Cloud stuff on Azure, Azure Sphere with Pluton, a LLVM like compiler stack using MSIL, contributions to OpenJDK JIT, Q# and Quantum stuff, ...
If you count OpenAI , Microsoft has produced a lot. Bell Labs existed in an era of conglomeration, where Microsoft existed in an era of startup culture, but the idea of monopolies spending cash on research is still there
Don't forget Microsoft ever since the early 90s or so. And I would argue they haven't produced much usable stuff in the research realm at all.
So I think it's more than just #1 and #2. There's also a #3: a national culture where doing great things is seen as more important than simply maximizing shareholder returns. The US had that many decades ago when it sent people to the Moon, but it lost it sometime after the 1980s.