Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain.
When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed.
I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't heard of anything interesting for years.
Per wikipedia:
IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards,
20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology,
five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018,
the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there.
First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff.
Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The IBM patent process is a well-oiled machine but they ain't exactly patenting transistor-level breakthroughs thousands of times a year.
I started at the tail of one research group’s mass exodus. It was like a bomb had gone off; the people left behind were trying to pick up the pieces. In essence, this group developed a sophisticated new technique, which the company urged them to commercialize. Pivoting to commercialization was a big effort, and not naturally within the expertise of this group, but they did it, largely at the expense of their own research productivity—for several years. They even hired programmers (ie, not people who are primarily computer scientists) and got it done. But just before launch, IBM pulled the plug.
This infuriated the researchers in the group. Keep in mind that career advancement in research is largely predicated on producing new research. In effect, IBM asked people to take a time out and then punished them for agreeing to do it. The whole group was extremely demoralized. Google was the largest beneficiary of this misstep.
I also had a similar, frustrating experience working for Microsoft, so it’s not just IBM, but the same dynamics were at work: bean counters asking researchers to commercialize something and then axing a project as it becomes deliverable.
If AI replaces any role in the company of the future, please let it be the managerial class.
We did that at Meta and Amazon too (for polycarbonate puzzle pieces, with no monetary award at all!). Every now and then something meaningful came out of it
Patents do, but in most cases it's trivial patents or patents for a "mutually assured destruction" portfolio (aka, you keep them in hand should someone ever decide to sue you).
That's a fundamental problem with how the Western sphere prioritizes and funds R&D. Either it has direct and massive ROI promises (that's how most pharma R&D works), some sort of government backing (that's how we got mRNA - pharma corps weren't interested, or how we got the Internet, lasers, radar and microwaves) or some uber wealthy billionaire (that's how we got Tesla and SpaceX, although government aids certainly helped).
All while we are cutting back government R&D funding in the pursuit of "austerity", China just floods the system with money. And they are winning the war.
A Nobel in 2026 doesnt carry the same weight as a Nobel in 1955.