It is pretty strange to blame the "more relaxed antitrust environment in the 1980s" when it was the 1982 anti-trust breakup of Ma Bell that destroyed Bell Labs and ended the monopoly profit flows that subsidized the telecom labs.
Without a monopoly a corporation will find it very difficult to justify research that can be used by other businesses.
The transistor was a disaster for the Bell System. It was not particularly useful in the telephony system of the day, which used high voltages in tube transmission equipment and high, intermittent currents in electromagnetic switching equipment. On the other hand, the 1956 Consent Decree forced the Bell System out of other businesses (audio, computer, consumer electronics, etc.) and out of other countries (Canada, Caribbean). So the Bell System could not use it's new transistor to expand in the businesses where it fit, and having a fundamental patent on it exposed the Bell System to great anti-trust scrutiny and greater regulatory duress, such as the FCC Computer Inquiries.
I don't understand how this follows, having fundamental patents should lead to the breakup of basically every large US company by the government by this logic.
AT&T licensed the transistor to a number of companies, so even if the Bell system didn't have a use for the device (it did in fact, in order to reduce the size of telephone exchanges) so they derived revenue from the invention. How this translates into a 'disaster' for the Bell System is unclear since it was eventually broken up because of the decision that long distance and local service should be different markets long after the patent on the transistor had expired.
Long distance and local service are not really different markets from a customer point of view, at least no one thinks of them as such today. All calls have become flat-rate nationwide. They were different markets from a supplier point of view for a couple decades, since long distance required analog frequency division microwave transmission equipment that had to be engineered end-to-end and switching systems able to translate NPA and NNX into trunk group selections. The latter was expensive and distinguished "toll" from "local" switching systems. However, by the time of the breakup, digital fiber optics and large memory computer-controlled switches already were making those supplier distinctions rapidly obsolete.
In a competitive industry the life of corporations might be brutish, nasty and short. Yes. But the life of workers and customers can be quite nice---since companies are competing for them, too.
What do you mean by top-of-band comp? In a competitive industry workers are paid according to their marginal productivity.
https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2019/10/california-wants-... has some background to what I was talking about.
Do keep in mind that industries can be (un-) competitive in different ways. Eg there's a good argument to be made that banks don't compete in competitive markets for many of their products, but they sure compete for labour.
Research tends to take a long-time to hit the market, in a dynamic market there is no reason to expect that a company funding open research would get a strong first mover advantage. A monopoly doesn't have this concern, Intel could fund semi-conductor research with decade+ time horizons and still be the first to put it to use.
Business management is rumoured to care about share prices. And as we can see in the current stock market, shareholders are long term enough to eg see past the current pandemic. They also managed to see past Tesla's losses or Amazon's slim profitability.
Yet, Bell Labs weren't the only corporate research lab. And on the big picture, they did disappear at the time that merges become common and most markets turned into monopolies.
This article has a very good argument for why only the market leaders would invest on those labs, and yet they are caused by the enforcement of competition rules.
Today the government doesn't even dream of that kind of regulation anymore. The idea of doing something purely for the public good seems to be lost in the race to make the quarterly numbers as big as possible.
In practice companies have always been run for the benefit of corporate insiders. Not the widows and orphans who might own a few stocks.
Yes, that helps a bit to align incentives. In practice, it's only a start.
(It's especially interesting because investors these days tend to be broadly diversified and typically own shares in all the companies in an industry. Managers are typically highly concentrated.)
That would imply that shareholders are idiots. And especially that all hedgefunds are idiots as well. Otherwise you'd expect a lot of short-selling once the stock price exceeds the long term health, wouldn't you?
With proper shortselling, a single entity can benefit from muckracking.
Of course, short selling is the first thing that gets banned at the drop of a hat. To give a timeless example: https://www.google.com/search?q=france+bans+short+selling
You are right that it can take a while in practice. We should make it easier for the reckoning to come.
I was told that one reason that Bell Labs was formed from parts of AT&T Engineering and Western Electric Engineering was to keep the researchers from meddling with the business and to keep the business from meddling with the research. The latter was important because a strategic objective was to use technological change as a driver to prevent the monopoly telecom business from going to seed. Within Bell Labs there were often competing groups working on alternative next generation systems - analog versus digital, tube versus transistor, space division versus time division switching, coax versus microwave, microwave versus fiber, etc.
https://www.telefoonmuseum.eu/index.php/1980-tot-2000/toeste...
Had a working T65 up to 2010. It was divorce, not deprecation which ended that.
Does it matter whether the line card, or you, handles the pulse?
Bring back the joy, revel in your antiquties, buy one!