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Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker writes about the implications that technology monopolies have for culture by asking "Who owns the Internet?". Three decades ago, few used the Internet for much of anything and the web wasn't even around. Today, nearly everybody uses the web, and to a lesser extent, other parts of the Internet for just about everything. However, despite massive growth, the Web has narrowed very much: "Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales."
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What Big Tech's Monopoly Powers Mean for Our Culture
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For recreational use only.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday August 23 2017, @04:58PM (10 children)
It's even more laughable when you realize that AT&T includes Bell Labs. Bell Labs gave us breakthroughs in technology, physics and mathematics such as: cosmic microwave background radiation, Transistors, Lasers, C/C++/S, Unix, Plan 9/Inferno, Hall Effect, CCD image sensor and many, many others.
Google gave us Android and walled gardens.
The age of the research wing is dead. Big companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, et al. are only interested in generating revenue by providing services. Research isn't marketable unless there is a clear path to profit. If they want new technology or see something interesting, they simply buy startups or smaller companies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @05:29PM
The foundational stuff is always easy; indeed, it tends to come about by accident.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Wednesday August 23 2017, @05:54PM (2 children)
You do realize that Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft invest Billions in pie-in-the-sky tech with questionable returns?
Facebook is looking at high-altitude wireless internet coverage, Amazon at new distribution and warehousing efficiency concepts... Sure, that's to eventually improve the bottom line, but it's not tomorrow's revenue.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:26PM
Well, to be fair, FaceBook is working on wireless "internet" coverage, where they get to pick what you can see, if you're referring to their Internet.org efforts. They have made some nice contributions to open source tools though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:36PM
I used to think that as well but became disillusioned after reading this [ieee.org] interview with Astro Teller. He's the head of "X" which is Alphabet/Google's innovation lab and the one which you're referencing whether or not you realize it. I'd recommend reading things in context but a telling quote or two from Teller is:
...
...
The whole division is far more pragmatic than the moonshot reputation. What he's talking about in the first quote about trying to kill the project is that that's generally stage 1 of any idea at X. 'How can we kill this project?' If they can kill it, they do - and move on. And the reasons for a project being killed do include there being no crystal clear path to profit. When pressed on the value of such a system Teller ends up stumbling over his words trying to explain why Google isn't pursuing it without simply saying they're concerned it won't produce sufficient revenue. For a ctrl+f the question includes "Robots aren't the best solution, is that what you're saying?"
I still personally believe that Google is covertly cooking up some exciting progress intermingling between AI and robotics - e.g. DeepMind meet Boston Dynamics (or whatever was yielded from them before they moved on.) But logically, I think that belief is probably more emotional than rationally justified. They're just a big corporation trying to make lots of money. That's not where innovations come from. On the other hand Google is supporting initiatives like DeepMind but that's likely because that whole team is capable of likely operating on a budget of $1 million a year excluding extraneous costs like hardware which vertical integration ensures will have a price approaching $0. And their product is likely already being directly integrated into things such as Google's search.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:20PM (4 children)
Bell Labs gave us breakthroughs in technology, physics and mathematics such as: cosmic microwave background radiation, Transistors, Lasers, C/C++/S, Unix, Plan 9/Inferno, Hall Effect, CCD image sensor and many, many others.
This one is not like the others: Plan9 hasn't seen any use anywhere outside a research lab or someone's pet project. It might have some interesting ideas (I haven't looked too closely), but almost everything else you list here has been a major commercial success, whereas Plan9 simply has not. (CMB isn't commercial, but it is an important thing in astrophysics.) If you could magically go back in time and eliminate Plan9 before it even got started (and then come back to the present and remember both timelines), I don't think you'd notice the difference. It's unfortunate when technically superior things end up not gaining any popularity, but that's the way it goes. (And I don't know if it really is or not; that's been argued about Beta vs. VHS but others will counter that Beta had fatal flaws.)
Another thing to remember is that Bell Labs did all this because they had a huge monopoly and could afford to plow tons of money into questionable research, some of which panned out brilliantly. The cost to this was high communications prices for consumers, and a real lack of innovation in what was supposed to be Bell's core mission: telecommunications. You weren't even allowed to own your own telephone for a very long time! How is another company supposed to, for instance, develop and market a cordless phone when consumers aren't even allowed to buy phones or plug phones into an outlet (only Bell technicians could do this for a time)? The lack of competition really held things back until they finally opened it up to alternative long-distance providers and equipment makers in the 70s/80s, and then suddenly we had much cheaper long-distance calling, answering machines, cellular phones, etc.
Finally, Alphabet and MS do do a lot of research, though it's questionable sometimes how much benefit it is (I think MS came up with the first workable photo-stitching algorithms, not sure). And they're doing it mostly the same way Bell did: enjoy a giant cash-cow monopoly (or near-monopoly), then pour some of that into pie-in-the-sky research. Maybe things were just easier back in those days, and all the low-hanging fruit is gone.
Also, I'd like to point out that UNIX, while commercially successful, was really a smaller, cheaper take-off of MULTICS, which had a lot of features that UNIX never did. It wasn't like they came up with the UNIX ideas all by themselves in a stroke of brilliance.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:23PM (2 children)
Plan9
>This one is not like the others: Plan9 hasn't seen any use anywhere outside a research lab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Impact [wikipedia.org]
"Additionally, in Plan 9 from User Space, several of Plan 9's applications and tools, including the sam and acme editors, have been ported to Unix and Linux systems and have achieved some level of popularity."
Plan9 was specifically for code development in a research environment, that's why it was made. There is no point in having Plan9 on one computer, it only comes into its own with multiple computers. It's a "distributed" OS. I see no reason it couldn't morph into an enterprise-level os, it's just not mostly used that way.
> It might have some interesting ideas (I haven't looked too closely),
It's pretty freaking sweet, if you ask me.
http://9front.org/ [9front.org]
THE PLAN FELL OFF!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:26PM
Bell Labs best invention was 9gag [9gag.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 25 2017, @12:15AM
Zero is some level of popularity.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday August 24 2017, @11:36AM
UTF-8 was designed for Plan9. Good contribution, isn't it?.
By the way, Plan9 was also the first OS using unicode
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:06AM
> It's even more laughable when you realize that AT&T includes Bell Labs.
I assumed that the OP was alluding to Bell Labs when writing "AT&T did fundamental and essential research." Do you interpret that differently? Bell Labs is now part of Nokia.
http://www.nokia.com/en_int/news/releases/2015/04/15/nokia-and-alcatel-lucent-to-combine-to-create-an-innovation-leader-in-next-generation-technology-and-services-for-an-ip-connected-world [nokia.com]