The death of corporate research labs
Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are the poster children for successful corporate R&amp;D labs, but I wonder if, to some extent, they were in the right place at the right time? The advent of modern computing and digital telephony provided rich soil for impactful research.<p>I worked for a large R&amp;D lab a while back after completing my PhD, but the organization turned out to be completely directionless. Funding went to snake-oil salesmen who charmed executives with flashy proposals that they could never deliver on. I don&#x27;t think there were any major successes during the time I was there, or since.<p>They also paid their Bay Area researchers about half the salary of FAANG senior engineers, so they really couldn&#x27;t retain top talent. This is the downside of being a corporate R&amp;D lab that&#x27;s not funded by a near-monopoly.