On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 2:53:26 PM UTC-5, Roger Wilco wrote:
On 2/10/19 2:29 PM, trader_4 wrote:
On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 1:27:52 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 08:13:08 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 9:21:55 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 05:26:49 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, February 10, 2019 at 6:21:56 AM UTC-5, Randull L. Stephenson wrote:
On 2/10/19 12:27 AM, Rod Speed wrote:
Nothing to do with corporate Kool Ade that AT&T did an immense
amount of innovation long before they were broken up. You dont
get Nobel Prizes for reducing the cost of running exchanges.


If you are using innovation as your metric, Comcast basically decimated AT&T here. Comcast offers gigabit fiber but AT$T only offers 6Mbps Slowverse.
Want TV from Slowverse? Here, nail this fugly dish up on your roof.


Looks to me like the only innovations at American Telegraph are their deceptive marketing lies.

https://arstechnica.com/information-...-service-5g-e/


Did Comcast invent the transistor? You're confusing buying and deploying
equipment, being faster to deploy new gear, more willing to invest in
infrastructure, with research and innovation.



They didn't invent the transistor so Sony could make little radios you
could hold up to your ear. They were trying to get rid of the half
billion relays in their switching equipment.

Were you there? The phone system also had need for amplifiers, just like
a Sony radio. AT&T invested billions in all kinds of research, without
knowing what it would ultimately be used for. They won a Nobel prize for
trapping atoms with a laser, for example. That's pretty far away from
any immediate business need.

We were talking about innovation that made it's way to the customer.

No, I said that despite being a monopoly, AT&T spent a fortune on research that advanced science and technology, including the invention of the transistor, which speaks for itself. It changed the world. And that most certainly also reached customers, not only at AT&T but everywhere around the world. You can find a transistor today in even the poorest, most backwoods places on the planet. You denied that AT&T's research amounted to anything, that they had any interest in innovation at all.




I'm sure there are some very smart inventive people at AT&T but you probably won't find them in management.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, manage.

Actually, very smart people were in management at Bell Labs, the research and development arm of AT&T. Penzias, the Noble prize winner, headed it at one point. Just because people are smart doesn't mean that they are good managers or are capable of changing a monopoly corporate culture by themselves. AT&T ran basically upside down. There were countless engineering teams developing things, working on ideas, making something, which they would then present to the AT&T product management and marketing people. They would then decide if they should take it to production. It was terribly inefficient and ass backwards. The right way is that product management and marketing understands their customers, their needs, the competition, the market and directs engineering on what to develop. What was amazing was that it went on at Bell Labs/Lucent for two decades after the break-up of AT&T. They just could not shake the old corporate culture that came from being a monopoly. It all went remarkable well for another twenty years. In fact, the world changing around them, actually boosted their business! As the world was moving to the internet, the first step was everyone needed a modem and more phone lines. They were selling 5ESS switches like hot cakes and thought they were geniuses. They didn't realize the consequences of what the internet was bringing and didn't react to it. Circa 2001 it finally caught up with them and they went into reverse and were caught unprepared in a downward spiral.

The old Bell Labs building in Holmdel NJ here used to have 6000 engineers and techs in a beautiful modernistic Eero Saarinen designed 2 mil sq ft building on a 400 acre park like property. It closed after the Lucent bust, redeveloping now into million dollar homes and condos on the property, the building into general office type space, which is still 90% empty. It opened around 1960, the glass mirrored building still looks modern today. At least they had good taste.