
Why Google isn't our Bell Labs - zchry
http://begun.co/why-google-isnt-our-bell-labs
======
jrochkind1
The Bell Telephone Company/AT&T was also a privately owned, publicly traded,
company with an obligation to maximize profit to shareholders.

I think there are probably a lot of differences between Bell Labs and Google.
Some of them are due to just differences in historical context between the 60s
and the 2000's, some are probably due to how Bell's monopoly effected it's R&D
approaches, sure. It would be interesting to delve into this.

But they are definitely not about the "fundamental differences between a
publicly traded company and a state-sanctioned monopoly," the OP is just
confused. Bell/AT&T was a publicly traded company, as well as a state-
sanctioned monopoly.

Also, in the histories of Unix that I've read, Bell/AT&T hardly _wanted_ to
contribute Unix to the 'public domain', they wanted to market/commercialize
it, they just failed -- and never really realized the potential market value
of what they had. There were also issues of AT&T being forbidden from entering
some aspects of computer business by a 1950s antitrust consent decree. (The
UNIX _developers_ on the other hand definitely wanted to share it, and often
had to act under the radar to do so. Another historical difference is that
they could get away with that.)

I think the author is perhaps guilty of romanticizing Bell Labs as they are
accusing others of romanticizing Google!

~~~
Tloewald
Glad you point out that Bell Labs' gifts to the public domain were involuntary
(they distributed unix source code without giving away the rights, then took
them back; UC Berkeley then created a free replacement so they could keep
teaching OS courses and At&T tried to sue them to oblivion and lost).

If you want to make the argument that Google isn't Bell Labs, it's probably
better to point out that Google isn't really tackling really fundamental
research projects like inventing the transistor and the laser. Even producing
Go isn't on par with C because C was amazing and unique for its time, whereas
Go is just part of a flood of new languages.

Bell Labs:UNIX::Google:Linux distribution.

~~~
pvdm
Google isn't doing basic research like measuring and discovering the
background radiation from the origins of the universe.

~~~
ProAm
That was an accident that turned out to be pretty damned amazing

~~~
pvdm
"chance favors the prepared mind"

------
dmayle
I may be a bit biased, because I'm a Googler... but looking through this
thread and seeing all the people downplaying Google's contributions to Go,
Android and Dart. As if they were minor...

But what about all of the papers that have changed the way the world does
computing? Some choice links below:

MapReduce
[http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html](http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html)

BigTable
[http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable.html](http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable.html)

Dremel Paper
[http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html)

Chubby Paper
[http://research.google.com/archive/chubby.html](http://research.google.com/archive/chubby.html)

Urs Holzle on OpenFlow:
[http://youtu.be/VLHJUfgxEO4](http://youtu.be/VLHJUfgxEO4)

Megastore Paper
[http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36971.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36971.html)

Spanner Paper
[http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html](http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html)

Granted, some of these will take awhile before having implementations outside
of Google... but you can't deny the impact of this work...

~~~
Aloisius
Papers that have changed the way the world does computing? You must be
kidding. A few thousand companies using (largely) poorly constructed products
based on some papers is not changing the world of computing.

Bell labs created the first transistor for goodness sakes. The photovoltaic
cell. The first gas laser! Wifi! TDMA and CDMA. The CCD. Hell half the
concepts of modern operating systems came from Bell Labs.

Mind you, Bell Labs had 90 years to do all this, but to even pretend like
Google compares is hubris.

~~~
cromwellian
Most companies running data centers are now copying the way Google runs data
centers, Google essentially reinvented large scale data center management.
Most of the online services that most people on the planet earth now consume
in some part or leverage the knowledge that was published in the papers listed
above.

You can look at data centers before and after Google the same way people look
at smartphones before and after the iPhone.

And Android didn't change things? Practically every new non-Apple consumer
electronics device that has any kind of UI uses the AOSP.

~~~
Aloisius
_Most companies running data centers are now copying the way Google runs data
centers_

Most companies don't run data centers. Of the ones that does, the vast
majority don't look a thing like Google because very, very few companies have
computing requirements that look anything like Google's

 _And Android didn 't change things?_

Changing the marketplace doesn't mean innovating. You can be very successful
(as Google is) without leaving so much as a footnote in history of invention.

~~~
nl
_Most companies don 't run data centers._

Most companies don't build transistors. Just sayn'

------
stochastician
In reading The Idea Factory[1] it became incredibly clear that Bell Labs only
released and licensed a great deal of this technology as the results of
various antitrust settlements that plagued the company throughout its entire
existence. Also, part of the role of the labs appears to have been to give the
company something to "show off" whenever congress or the DOJ complained about
the extraction of monopoly rents. I highly recommend the book, it was really
fascinating to see the degree to which many of our assumptions about the
functioning of the labs and its relationship with the corporation are in fact
historically inaccurate.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-
Innovation/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-
Innovation/dp/0143122797)

~~~
atlas1j
Indeed "The Idea Factory" is a very good book recommendation. In the
conclusion of the book the author argues that the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute[1] may be the closest existing research organization to Bell Labs.
While much smaller in size than Bell Labs it shares a focus on basic research
and is well funded for the long haul.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institute](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institute)

------
lvs
_Google, as a publicly traded company, has an obligation to maximize profit
for shareholders — and there’s nothing wrong with that!_

Why is there always this knee-jerk instinct to disclaim any critique of
unfettered capital? It unhinges the basic thesis of his argument to say
"there's nothing wrong with that." The claim is obviously that there is
something -- albeit loosely defined -- wrong with it, which is why the
comparison is being made in the first place. Let's feel free to have a real
discussion about whether there's something wrong with the primary motive of
enterprise to be maximizing shareholder profit, shall we?

~~~
forgottenpass
_Why is there always this knee-jerk instinct to disclaim any critique of
unfettered capital?_

As a dude that makes this disclaimer when trying to make a more subtle point,
it acts as a sort of a preemptive dismissal to the just-as-kneejerk
"SOCIALIST!" or "ENTITLEMENT!" critiques. A way to separate critiques of a
business model itself from some saying "in this one context, this business
model has some ramification that aren't so hot" is useful.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Except that a nasty ramification is itself evidence in favor of a broad
critique of the business model. And what's wrong with socialists?

~~~
forgottenpass
_Except that a nasty ramification is itself evidence in favor of a broad
critique of the business model._

I guess, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. You can probably extrapolate
any small point into a larger one if you want, but it'd be disingenuous to
paint any "this thing isn't perfect" point as _broad_ critique.

 _And what 's wrong with socialists?_

I didn't say there was. It's not uncommon for people to loudly dismiss things
that even hint at questioning their world view with eye-roll-educing cries of
socialism. If we're not actually discussing socialism, this can be a time
wasting distracting and it's often worthwhile to nip that tangent in the bud.

------
dadkins
Bell Labs most certainly did not release Unix into the public domain:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi)

~~~
sliverstorm
Technically accurate, but it's not that simple.

 _Under a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, AT &T (the
parent organization of Bell Labs) had been forbidden from entering the
computer business.. Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product.
Indeed, under the terms of the decree, Bell Labs was required to license its
non-telephone technology to anyone who asked._

 _AT &T made Unix available to universities and commercial firms, as well as
the United States government, under licenses. The licenses included all source
code including the machine-dependent parts of the kernel_

\--
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix)

So, while they did not actually release it to public domain, they got about as
close as they could have without actually doing so.

Remember the GPL didn't exist until 1989. Also, I would speculate the
generally free access to Unix V probably helped bring about the modern
environment of open source, which didn't really exist then.

~~~
jasomill
According to Wikipedia[1], AT&T/Bell Labs UNIX license fees (for non-academic
use) during the '70s and '80s ranged from $20,000—$200,000, and the terms were
not even close to public domain, free, or open.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Systems_Research_Group](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Systems_Research_Group)

------
raldi
_> In fact, despite being a part of a state sanctioned monopoly, Bell Labs
produced a staggering amount of freely-available knowledge_

Wasn't it _because_ of the state-sanctioned monopoly that Bell Labs released
so much? I thought that was part of the deal they made with the government.

~~~
p4bl0
Yea, I came here to ask the same question. I don't understand the presence of
"despite" in that sentence.

------
bjt
Google to Bell Labs is not an apt comparison. The better one would be Google
to AT&T. Both Google and AT&T have components (like Bell Labs) that produce
open technology. The author's omission of Go, Dart, and Android is glaring.

This article will look even sillier in the future when we're being taxied
around in our driverless cars, after Google has had the decades that Bell Labs
had to make its accomplishments.

------
lambda
I think the big difference is that Bell Labs did much more fundamental
research: basic science, physics, material physics, semiconductors. Google is
putting a good deal of money into R&D, into engineering research like the self
driving car and now robotics, but not basic science the way Bell Labs was.

------
aiiane
People seem to be bringing up Go, Dart, Android as things to debate over, but
there are some other potential things to consider, like MapReduce. In fact,
I'd argue that MapReduce has had a far more profound impact than any of the
previous three. It's hard to find a large-scale data processing pipeline that
isn't essentially built on top of the principles that MapReduce began.

~~~
gaius
Do you really believe that? Map and reduce were available in FP languages in
the 1970s! Yes Google have a nice implementation of doing it in a distributed
compute cluster, but there was no new discovery there.

~~~
skj
As I mentioned in another post, the map-reduce concept that has been around
for quite some time is not the same as the MapReduce process that Google has
instrumented. Google has a way to run it super-efficiently on data centers,
with distributed disks, processors, networks, etc. _That_ is Google's oft-
emulated MapReduce.

~~~
ithkuil
And that's also why people don't get the expected magic out of clones that
implement only a part of said stack.

------
sprslf
Surely everyone knows that the people who created UNIX, C, and Unicode are the
same people who have created Go. Right? Ken Thompson? Rob Pike? You certainly
know who these people are. Do you care what company they currently work for?

------
jayd16
Ignoring the obvious difference in reach and success, in what way are Go, Dart
and Android not equivalent to C, C++ and Unix in terms of open software
projects?

~~~
nly
* Go is just a less crufty C with a few niceties (modules, gc, coroutines).

* Dart, imho, is just an attempt to capitalise on Java expats, like they did with Android, but this time in the browser. It's sadly a much less interesting language than Javascript, which it aims to replace. It does however fit the bill of getting more enterprise friendly software running in the browser and in the cloud.

* Android is a pretty crappy Java runtime running on top of Linux. It's not at all interesting.

What all of these things lack in comparison to C, C++, Unix, and itself Java
for that matter, is broad, industry wide repercussions. None of them are the
culmination of years of careful research. If you look for the huge public-
facing industry epochs out of Google, you're looking at marketing and social
change, not individual technologies.

~~~
jbooth
Android has industry-wide repercussions. I'm too young to remember but my
history says that UNIX was regarded as a crappy, uninteresting operating
system for years.

Go's dealing with a much more established computing environment than C, so
it's not going to take over the industry overnight, but a lot of us think it
hits the niche between C and Python very well, and could (with enough time)
dislodge Java as the choice for most server-side development.

Agreed on dart.

More importantly, look at how much google stuff is _not_ public: Their whole
distributed computing infrastructure. That's why they're not bell labs.

~~~
jerf
I always loathe these attempts to compare how "innovative" the past is
compared to the future, when the relative ease of mining entirely new fields
of endeavor is not considered. One might as well complain that Humanity's days
of invention are clearly behind us, because in the past thousand years we've
come up with at most one invention on par with Fire, The Written Word, and
Agriculture. And piffle, Computing is hardly that anything more than an
obvious extension of other things anyhow.

We do not get to discover brand new fields of endeavor every day. _Of course_
Go isn't as "innovative" as C... probably no computer language can be as
innovative as C ever again. (Or Lisp, or a couple of others.) Even if one were
to somehow be constructed (or simply pulled from the future somehow) it would
almost certainly still have some sort of pedigree that could be traced whereby
people could poo-poo its innovativeness. This is not a weakness, this is a
_strength_ of the richness of the field and how much exploration we've done.
We don't get to discover new fundamental things every day precisely _because_
we've done such a good job of exploration in so many fields, not because we've
lost the ability to explore.

~~~
pcwalton
I disagree that there is no room for PL innovation left. I think the situation
with Go is that the authors were deliberately trying not to innovate too much
in the interests of familiarity.

There's lots of programming language innovation going on, you just don't see
it in languages like Dart and Go. Which, by the way, is fine; Go has plenty of
reason to exist without being innovative from a PL standpoint. (I would point
to languages like Clojure, Kotlin, Scala, and C# as examples of industry
innovation in programming languages.)

~~~
MichaelGG
I guess this is sort of flame-baity, but what did C# really innovate in? Even
the highly-lauded LINQ is a few functional features + reified code (and rather
ad-hoc at that). I know LINQ is award-winning, and probably changed the
industry by putting functional concepts in front of tons of people that
wouldn't have otherwise used it. But is there anything even remotely new in
C#'s actual language design? (Yes, anyone can be a critic.)

~~~
pcwalton
async/await and "where" clauses for variance/existential types, perhaps?

~~~
MichaelGG
Async workflow was in F# about 5 years before C#, and implemented purely as a
library - no hardcoded keywords needed. As I understand, any language with
monad syntax can create such a feature.

The new generic variance is actually interesting. AFAIK, the MSR team had that
as part of the spec, and it's been sitting in the CLR since 2.0. It's curious
that C# is the only language besides MSIL to expose the feature.

------
ansible
And yet Google does release a lot of stuff. They are doing a lot to advance
the state of the art in day-to-day computing. Operating systems, programming
languages, lots of stuff.

~~~
kvb
While this is true, I think Microsoft Research is much more akin to Bell Labs
than Google (though I'm biased). See e.g. this list of top CS papers [1].

[1]
[http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html](http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html)

~~~
psbp
Is Google's research:
[http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html)
inferior?

~~~
kvb
In my opinion, yes, but others are free to disagree (and "inferior" is
subjective). In addition to the kinds of applied research that Google also
does (machine learning, etc.), MSR also does a lot of fundamental research
much further afield, like that done by the biology group at MSR Cambridge [1],
or the quantum computing work done in the quantum computing group and Station
Q [2] (see also Scott Aaronson's relevant blog post [3]).

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/groups/biology/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/biology/)

[2] [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/groups/quarc/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/quarc/)

[3]
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1471](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1471)

~~~
thezilch
Except Google does plenty of [1] biological [1] based [2] studies [3] too [4].

And, of course, quantum [5] computing [6] studies [7] too [8].

[0]
[http://ai.stanford.edu/~gal/Research/ActivityMotifs/](http://ai.stanford.edu/~gal/Research/ActivityMotifs/)

[1]
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/34936.pdf)

[2]
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/35765.pdf)

[3]
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/14156.pdf)

[4]
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/32875.pdf)

[5]
[http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36657.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36657.html)

[6]
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/35383.pdf)

[7]
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/35382.pdf)

[8]
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/33477.pdf)

~~~
kvb
Don't get me wrong, Google does lots of great research across a variety of
fields. And I'm neither a biologist nor a quantum physicist, so I can't claim
to know exactly how important either MSR or Google's research is in those
fields, but my distinct impression is that Microsoft is investing more and
doing more in each of them (again, see the Aaronson post for the take of one
person familiar with the state of quantum physics research). And not that it's
especially important, but for the at least the first paper you cite it doesn't
look like any of the research was actually done at Google.

~~~
thezilch
It's really strange to discuss putting weights of importance on topics you
(and I) are tangibly quantify.

I'm not even sure how anyone justifies claiming MS or Google research is
_inferior_ to the other's. If we have that much insight into what is superior,
then surely we've already won and know where to throw our bucks?

Regardless, Google already does plenty of work in these fields. This year,
they've expanded to partnerships with NASA, USRA, and D-Wave with a new AI Lab
--
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMdHDHEuOUE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMdHDHEuOUE).

------
melling
It seems strange how people will really jump on these sort of discussions. Are
they more for entertainment? Do people feel like they gain a lot of
information? Simply the fun of sparring? It would be cool to better
understand. Maybe there's a business model here? Can't think of anything
catchy.

"Why is ..." vs. "Why isn't..."

------
brudgers
The underlying analogy is hopelessly flawed. Google is all of Google, yet
Bell.Labs was but part of AT&T. So when we speak of Google we get pure
frontline business operations and sales teams and marketing departments and
product support engineers as part of package. While Bell Labs is a jewel box
containing fewer messy details.

------
auggierose
So how many nobel prizes did Google generate so far?

------
sytelus
Armchair expert articles like these make conclusion first and justify it
later. Google has obviously given a LOT back to community. They had all the
reasons to keep BigTable or MapReduce or GWT as trade secrets. On the other
hand, Bell labs never intended all research to go to public domain. In reality
lot of things "escaped" to public domain because they apparently did not saw
any competitive benefit in them. Also saying that only Google is doing this is
also purely false. FaceBook and Twitter has given back to community a lot.
Similarly Microsoft Research has published probably more research (many times
including the one that offered competitive advantage) than very likely any
other company on the planet: [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/groups/science/publicati...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/groups/science/publications.aspx).

------
cloudwizard
They may not be Bell labs but they are the closest that this generation has.

~~~
MichaelGG
Isn't MSR a true and proper dedicated research lab?

------
damon_c
Google is still barely a decade old. Give them a few more years. Maybe they'll
come up with something that will please you guys!

------
dexen
The Bell Labs Song [1] neatly lists all the innovations -- and the list goes
on and on, ranging from physics and cosmology, through low-level electronics
and programming, to systems and organization design and applied math concepts.

Oh, and four Nobel Prizes.

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfdnFOiXUU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfdnFOiXUU)

------
ramsaysnuuhh
Is this even worth debating? No one at Google comes even close to the
greatness of, say, Shannon or Deming.

------
rch
Applied Minds is our Bell Labs. And there are a couple of other companies I
know of. Large corporations don't qualify.

