It can be argued that the divestiture of the bell system in the 80s eventually led to the collapse of the investment into r&d/bell labs being a beneficial thing because it paved the way for the internet to grow (laid the transoceanic infra), in turn led to products over big science—now we just have multiple monoliths overseeing each other it seems, but we’re also missing the elephant who being at&t the parent were themselves pioneers of tech that’d allowed them over a 100 yrs of state regulated monopoly (similar to Standard Oil), which the breakup later proved with its failure to compete in the freemarket with other players like IBM etc. because of the lack of guaranteed customers. to their credit they had an exceptional talent for getting the best minds together under one roof. funnily enough they rejected the offer from the dod to take over the arpanet beause they didn’t think it would be profitable, well thankgod. not to mention in a way they’d asked to be broken up so they could compete with emerging digital tech, in a quid pro quo to demonopolize, held the patents & hardware to get competitors in on the network to create a level field, interestingly post the paring down the aggregate value of shares distributed didn’t fall but more than doubled in market value. developing as an offshoot of the main engineering western electric the manufacturing subsidiary of the equipment serviced by the bell system (earning via its license fee), the engg dept + at&t being the world’s largest corp by far at the time & the sole propreitors of comms it would’ve been awful strange if they didn’t funnel some of their budget into r&d, which they obviously didn’t so & the moat from competitive pressures so they could innovate in areas not quite in the realm of telephones but only retain what was required while several other stuff went awol (at the same time held patent + ip etc), but to the world it only meant the vertical integration impeded it (about 1% of we’s budget/tax on revenues of bell cos went to the labs alone btw), eating up taxpayer money & competition, a rather anomalous org (even wilder management who shielded the labs from at&t antics) which didn’t micromanage outlandish endeavours—is probably key & often overlooked, that even under conducive conditions is rare & pure luck to have such culture. which really meant you could buy just about any cool device for ‘research’. what’s also incredible is how it then put itself back together through all sorts of legal/m&a tricks. otoh parc was concurrently doing their thing in the westcoast, & they’d their hands in as much cool stuff as any other r&d player at the time being funded by state orgs & thanks to them we got gfx interfaces. the only entity near equivalent today would be googl, whose own X/labs didn’t quite turn out the way they expected let alone internal projects’ fates; there’s also a reason why many of the ex-labs folks ended up in googl. if corporations can exist in a competitive industry only few can get away with investing ‘frivolous’ longterm low yield research because they can’t afford to get away without chasing short term profits & even fewer if some do it’s bound to eventually dry up, as there’s always an opp cost worth saving for the co & priorities have shifted to shareholder value; & also corp taxes—the primary incentive for the firms to fund such a project in the first place; ideally you need both: balancing useful innovation & providing commercial value and the moonshot factory. there was a neat little dialectic going on in the labs, where the more immediate ground level needs turned the research into more real inventions which could be tested in realtime experiments with feedback + iteration in a free environment aided by gargantuan scale meant they could indeed attempt to explore sans agenda. this only goes to show how even at its best it needs checks and balances to be put in place. but maybe the contradictions of capitalism make it inevitably so that such a feat is rarely if ever a possibility which isn’t eventually in history remain a one trick pony, in short capitalism is such a pathetic system that even when it works it self sabotages itself into cannibalism. Of course the liberals and laissez-faire-ers would claim that isn’t “real” capitalism because they like to think it hasn’t been tried/executed in their own imagined way but again naturally, the joke is on them.