AT&T Labs' Brain Drain

Frisky070802 writes "The Newark Star-Ledger has an article on the brain drain at AT&T Labs, which laid off close to half its researchers two years ago this month, another good fraction last spring, and has lost many of the rest through voluntary departures. The article claims that only Microsoft might have the money to fund basic research as Bell Labs did years ago, though many (including me) would put IBM in the same camp. It cites problems at AT&T, ranging from researchers paying their own way to present at conferences to a loss of free espresso and bottled water. Many luminaries, such as Lorrie Faith Cranor, Avi Rubin, and Bjarne Stroustrup, are quoted --- with Stroustrup saying the lab was "mugged" by Wall Street. (Rumor has it that the losses haven't stemmed, with more top-notch researchers going to academia in the coming months.)" (Non-registration ZIP and age demographic collection.)

At&t labs, great contributer to computing.

[rkz]

It is very sad to see AT&T labs whittle away like this, over the years they were responsible for a number of great inventions:

1. VNC - which is a multiplatform Remote administration tool. [att.com]
2. Text to speach. [att.com]
3. Multimodal data access
4. Handwriting recognition.
5. Wlan technologies

Probably many more which I cant even remember.

Great Tactics

[RobertTaylor]

"We are playing to win," AT&T Labs President Hossein Eslambolchi told industry analysts in February.

Interesting way to go about it!

My Auction: Pan Tilt Ethernet Webcam For Sale [ebay.co.uk]

ATT is not the only one

[alphakappa]

The brain drain from Industry to Universities has been going on for some time. For the past few years, the focus of Industry has been on developing marketable technologies, as would justify the investment of venture capitalists. Also with smaller companies working on bringing products to market faster, the pressure on bigger companies to preferentially fund tangible research has been more.
I don't know if research has suffered because of this - most basic research at American universities are funded by defense projects, and they are funded well. I'm not sure if this will produce the kind of innovative stuff that came out of Bell labs, but at least fundamental research is alive!

IBM

[afidel]

IBM does a LOT of research, but only a small percentage of it is the type of basic research that leads to BIG jumps in technology. In other words they do process refinement and some materials science research but very little basic science research that leads to the kinds of discoveries that brought about optical lasers, the transistor, etc.

Re:At&t labs, great contributer to computing.

[irokitt]

Ah, you forgot to mention the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and all of the immense contributions surrounding those two developments alone.
Unfortunately, I don't see Microsoft pursuing research quite like Bell/AT&T Labs has. And IBM is making contributions to software (Linux) and hardware (The processor in the Mac G5) but is not going to devote research to the breadth of things AT&T has focused on.
The good news is that most of the people leaving the Labs are going into academia, so quite a few CS departments are going to be improved.

Re:At&t labs, great contributer to computing.

[crimson30]

What about Unix?

When I think of Bell Labs, I think Unix and the transistor and yet you skipped those, oddly enough.

Researchers are Paying Their Own Way

[robbyjo]

Well, researchers are often paying their own way except if they are one of the chairs, which they are offered some complimentary registration fee. Some of bonafide conferences actually pay their expenses if they are invited.

Honestly, researcher communities (especially the academic ones) are disdainful to the "achievements" of "industrial research". The reject rates on industrial papers have been pretty high (usually more than 50%). This is because that the "innovations" of industrial "research" are more or less either one or some of the following: rehashing old ideas, implementing old ideas with new looks / new aspects / into new problems which often not worth mentioning, combining several old ideas in some obvious ways.

Well, this is not to say that industrial papers are crap, but of course there are some excellent industry researchers, which are usually ex-professors which are already well known before they enter the industries. However, research is like a big gamble: either you win big or you lose big. Given the current situation of the economy, it's more likely you lose big because of "lack of genuinely new ideas" and you can never get a guarantee that your research group is actually producing the great useful results for your company. It's a whole lot better for the company to actually scour the conferences, spot the prominent person with the right ideas, and then "steal" them so that they can implement the said idea for your company. This is exactly what Microsoft has been doing in the past years.

Since I never attended trade/business oriented conferences, I can't comment on those. Moreover, these conferences are usually way more expensive than the academia ones (thousands of $$ vs hundreds of $$).

Re:AT&T Labs?

[Jonathan]

The part that went to Lucent is called Bell Labs [bell-labs.com] -- the part that stayed is called AT&T Labs [att.com]

Re:GNU/OPEN SOURCE ONLY COPIES, NEVER CREATES

[Anonymous Coward]

I challenge any of you to name something that is original and open source.

Mosaic?

Re:IBM

[jabberjaw]

Ahem, although it was a bit ago, IBM researchers did develop the Scanning Tunneling Microscope.

Re:Academia

[Keeper]

If you're going to make fun of the work being done at Microsoft Research [microsoft.com], you might want to do some 'research' yourself first. They're doing real research, as opposed to doing feature work for existing products.

Re:What do you expect?

[shis-ka-bob]

Many graduate schools have teaching and research assistanceships. You don't need to to be rich to get into grad school. Being a 'grad student' is the entry job into a research position. The next step is 'post-doc', then you get to be a junior faculty. There is a very clear career path for research.

The Plan9 team was more than decimated

[DrSkwid]

The lay offs at bell-labs have had a massive negative imapact on plan9.

Rob Pike [bell-labs.com] has gone to google for instance

Stories of them taking out 75% of the light bulbs [theregister.co.uk] in the labs to save money.

We're down to three devs from the labs working on plan9, mostly in their own time.

So sad, Lucent have bungled it.

But wait! There's MORE!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

- Transistors.
- Information theory.
- Graph Theory. (Especially as related to signal interconnectivity and switching.)

I could go on for pages. (One copy of the Bell Labs Journal collected back issues took up several shelves in the University library when I was a freshman - in 1965 - and much of that related to or enabled some aspect of comptuers.

Bell Labs - Columbus

[rlp]

I worked at Bell Labs in Columbus, OH for ten years when I first got out of school. Great place, interesting work, and lots of very smart people. Most of the folks I knew there are gone. When AT&T split into AT&T / Lucent, the Columbus Labs went with Lucent. The management of Lucent then proceeded to run the company into the ground. The dotcom bust and telecom implosion (i.e. Worldcom) didn't help either.

Today the Lucent branch of Bell Labs is a shadow of it's former greatness. It's ranks have been decimated, and most of what's left is being shipped overseas. A rather sad and undeserving epitaph for what was once one of America's premier R&D institutions.

P.S. For any BTL alumni out there - I worked in area 59 - on speech recognition in Conversant, and then on DCS (the Display Construnction Set) - a UIMS for network management.

What private corporate labs are left?

[Animats]

It's not just Bell Labs. Xerox PARC was spun off as a private company, and isn't doing well. RCA did the same thing with RCA Labs years ago, forming Sarnoff Labs, noted primarily for developing the losing technology for HDTV. When IBM exited the disk drive business, IBM Almaden Labs lost much of its reason for existence, and the people I know there aren't happy. DEC's R&D operation disappeared after the Compaq acquisition.

Outside of drugs/biotech and automotive, it's hard to think of any major US corporate research labs not in decline.

A brief corporate history

[ScottForbes]

For those trying to understand the differences between "AT&T" and "Bell Labs," a brief history:

1875

Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent on the telephone, and forms a company called Bell Telephone. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, this company eventually becomes known as AT&T.

1894

Bell's patents expire and telephony enters the public domain. Six thousand incompatible telephone companies go into business between 1894 and 1904; AT&T begins buying them and knitting a nationwide network.

1908

AT&T acquires controlling interest in Western Union, the telegraph company.

1913

First anti-trust action against AT&T; Western Union divested. Monopoly regulation of AT&T gradually tightens over the years.

1925

Bell Labs founded. Over the next 50 years, Bell Labs invents UNIX, C, the long-playing record, the speech synthesizer, transistor, cell phone, laser, electret microphone, light-emitting diode, stereogram, videophone, charge-coupled devices, and discovers information theory, finite-state automation, and (accidentally) radio astronomy.

1956

AT&T signs a consent decree restricting the company's activities, and agrees not to expand its business beyond the national telephone system and government work. This means that it can't make money off C, UNIX, laser beams or anything else it invented after 1956, except for sales within the telephony industry itself.

1982

AT&T agrees to exit the local phone business in order to escape antitrust regulation and lawsuits, spining off seven Baby Bells: NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Ameritech, US West, Pacific Telesys, and Southwestern Bell. The Baby Bells go through several mating dances, with various wireline and wireless parts merging into Verizon, SBC, Cingular, Qwest and other companies.

1991

AT&T, having no luck in the computer business it's now free to enter, acquires NCR in a hostile takeover. NCR was right to be hostile: The combined company still misses the boat, having missed its window of opportunity.

1994

AT&T acquires McCaw Cellular ("Cellular One") and rebrands it as AT&T Wireless. This drives a wedge between AT&T and many customers who purchase wireless equipment from AT&T, since the company is now both supplier and competitor.

1995-7

AT&T splits into three separate entities: AT&T, the long distance company; Lucent Technologies, the manufacturing arm; and NCR, the burned-out shell of a once-great company. Lucent gets Bell Labs and most of the blue-sky physics research; AT&T keeps a subset that does speech and software research, and calls it AT&T Labs.

2000

The entire telecommunications industry goes over a cliff. Lucent and AT&T both frantically cut costs, spining off businesses and slashing R&D budgets to raise capital and stay alive. This leads to the spinoff of Avaya (Lucent's consumer and business products) and Agere (microelectronics), and the sale of AT&T's broadband assets to Comcast and its wireless assets to Cingular.

Anyhow, the point of all this is that (a) Lucent got the lion's share of Bell Labs in the '96 spinoff, including the name; and (b) the "real" Bell Labs has been downsized just as badly as its former sibling at AT&T, although Lucent is slightly ahead of the business curve and is hopefully through the worst of the cost-cutting. (Lucent was also first in line when it was time to go over the cliff, of course, so being ahead of the curve doesn't always work to your advantage.)

(The obligatory disclaimer: I work for Lucent, but I'm not even vaguely attempting to speak on their behalf. I'm sure AT&T veterans would tell the tale differently, emphasizing the heroic role of AT&T Labs in the liberation of Stalingrad or some such, but this is what passes for corporate history in my weak and enfeebled mind.)

Re: PARC & profits

[hexatron]

1973-The laser printer invented at Xerox PARC
This did earn X a few good bux
1973 also saw the invention of Ethernet there and lots of other things of interest.

There is a PARC history timeline at here [xerox.com]

Re:SCO & Mondavi/Rothschild Opus One

[NateTech]

SCO isn't even *that* SCO anymore. Or hadn't you heard. Today's SCO isn't the "Santa Cruz Organization" of old, they're the "SCO Group" -- a group of businessmen who have a track record of buying up dying companies and finding things to sue about to pump up their value. Really.

Re: SAIC now owns Labs, I believe.

[vjmurphy]

No, SAIC bought Telcordia (formerly Bellcore). SAIC has nothing to do with either Bell Labs or AT&T Labs.

Re:Common in a lot of industries

[dcw3]

Well, this is a very common problem. I remember when I went for interviews in 2000...all the reps at Raytheon and Boeing were saying how a huge part of their workforce was going to retire, and all that knowledge was going to walk right out the door.

Clearly, your hiring patterns have to be continuous. You can sit out economic cycles, but you can't sit out entire generations.

As a 22 yr veteran of one of the above mentioned companies, I can tell you that we've been through at least five cycles of hiring & layoffs. One of the options when layoffs are about to occur, is for management to ask folks who are nearing retirement to take that walk a bit earlier, usually for a little extra incentive. This usually frees up a high-paying postion, along with the associated dollars. Unfortunately, at companies as large as our, consistency isn't the same from site to site. So, you're likely to hear a different story at just about every facility. We have nearly 2000 folks at my location, and though there are occasionally serious losses, there's never been what you described.