Ask HN: What is the current day Xerox Park / Bell Labs? - serverQuestion
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enkiv2
It doesn't really exist -- public funding (which drove blue sky research in
both these places along with funding the Arpanet work done at BBN & elsewhere,
PLATO, etc) dried up in the late 70s. No company can (or has the incentives
to) invest in undirected research the way Bell did with Bell Labs (though RCA
was a peer of Bell's at the time), because nobody has a government-granted
nationwide monopoly on communications infrastructure peered with a legitimate
fear that their monopoly position will be lost forever due to sudden changes
in the whims of legislators.

Some ex-PARC folks tried to continue in the spirit of PARC's work at the
Viewpoints Research Institute (after Kay tried and failed to do it in the
private sector at Apple and Atari). Ex-Bell Labs folks (at least in computing)
seem to end up at Google or at Microsoft Research, but it seems like they're
only given the leeway they have because they already have clout from Bell
Labs...

Microsoft, Facebook, and Google all have skunkworks departments doing blue-sky
research, but they all seem to have a lot more oversight & pressure to
productize. Over in academia, the MIT Media Lab was trying to be their
equivalent of PARC, but the emphasis on creating demos to wow tech journalists
has just reproduced the worst parts of SV pitch culture.

