Document: WM-081 P. Webb Category: Computing 2026-01-13 The Reason Why We'll Never Get Another Bell Labs Abstract Or Xerox PARC, for that matter. Body The technologies that underpin much of modern society were invented by Bell Labs[1], Xerox PARC[2], and BBN[3]; the Unix operating system, C and C++ programming langauges, laser printing, Ethernet, modern computing paradigms, the mouse, e-paper, email, and the precursor to the internet, just to name a *few*. These R&D labs however, only existed because of the monopolies their parent companies enjoyed (or DARPA contracts, in the case of BBN). With all this extra money, why not put some of it toward being THE place for attracting inventors, researchers, and engineers? Positive press from next-generation discoveries makes the investors happy, the market is happy, the stock price is happy. Big Tech has shied away from that. Instead of "how great would this be for the world?" it's "how great would this be for US?" In other words, they fail the "just release cool shit" challenge. Remember Phonebloks[4]? Remember Project Ara[5]? Modular smartphone projects with the aim to reduce waste and make a phone feel like you actually owned it? Google shut them down. Or maybe you remember Dark Sky, the weather API that was so damn good that Apple acquired and sunset it. You can still build on it, Dark Sky has been wrapped into WeatherKit[6]. You just need to pay the annual $99 developer fee and then API fees if you make more than half a million API calls a month (your weather app gets popular). _There are tons more examples, those are what comes to mind easily._ Software is eating the world[7] and Big Tech is eating software and leaving us crumbs. What happened to leaving the world better than you found it? Acquiring and exterminating great ideas is not the way. The irony is that Big Tech is terrified of harboring the very conditions that enabled its existence...curiousity, ingenuity, and rejection of the status quo (and a smattering of luck). I grew up an avid reader of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines and was enamored with depictions of future tech. Microsoft regularly made videos[8] showcasing where they saw the future going and it signaled to me that they might be a forward-thinking company as well. I thought adults were the *coolest* because they were hard at work building an awesome future for my generation to live, work, and play in. Boy was I fucking wrong. No one talks about the immense disappointment that comes with realizing you believed in a fantasy world that you were *taught* was the real world. Instead, we share memes about "the future we were promised" and laugh to hide the collective pain. I'll be 38 this year and I'm more than a little disgruntled about all this. Ink & Switch[9] is an R&D lab working on cool stuff and they aren't attached to a corporation, they're a collection of like-minded folks exploring the future. We need more of them. The era of cash-infused ideological backers is long gone; which is unfortunate because the cost of living is too damn high. I guess I'm just ranting that I missed out on getting paid to create the future and am frustrated that I gotta do it for free. Ah well, it is what it is. I've pulled myself up by the bootstraps before, I suppose I could do it again. 🕸️ References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]