> People said the same thing about Bell Labs and they were profoundly wrong.
They were profoundly wrong, but not about Bell Labs' ability to create value from their research. That, they were absolutely dead-on about. AT&T and Bell Labs were absolutely awful at reading the room about what their technology could do and how it could be monetized.
Some of that was just packaging things the right way, and some of it - like charging absolutely insane license fees for UNIX in the 80s and 90s during the beginnings of the personal computing revolution - was because of lazy execs who didn't want to really put in any effort. Either way, I'm not using a Bell Labs LabsBook Pro to write code for a UNIX OS, and I'm not using Bellgle to search for information. AT&T ultimately thought the best way to create value from Bell Labs was to sell that division.
We're in a long, hot AI summer, but we've had winters too. Who knows which hemisphere they're in at Google right now.
They were profoundly wrong, but not about Bell Labs' ability to create value from their research. That, they were absolutely dead-on about. AT&T and Bell Labs were absolutely awful at reading the room about what their technology could do and how it could be monetized.
Some of that was just packaging things the right way, and some of it - like charging absolutely insane license fees for UNIX in the 80s and 90s during the beginnings of the personal computing revolution - was because of lazy execs who didn't want to really put in any effort. Either way, I'm not using a Bell Labs LabsBook Pro to write code for a UNIX OS, and I'm not using Bellgle to search for information. AT&T ultimately thought the best way to create value from Bell Labs was to sell that division.
We're in a long, hot AI summer, but we've had winters too. Who knows which hemisphere they're in at Google right now.