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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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(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