Bell Laboratories Acquired by Berkshire Hathaway

Like seriously, 2. alone seems like a futureproof business. Imagine the rat plagues when housing and plumbing have become completely unaffordable to renters, with no regulations for landlords!

Must be a trove of gold!

AT&T spun off their technology unit (Bell Labs and Western Electric) as Lucent Technologies way back in 1996. If you're old enough, you may have seen phones that said "Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs Innovations". Lucent was bought by the French company Alcatel to create Alcatel-Lucent in 2006. Alcatel-Lucent was bought by Nokia in 2016. So now we have Nokia Bell Labs. Since 1996, we've seen Bell Labs change hands once a decade so maybe next year we'll see a new owner of Bell Labs.

I kinda agree that it seems like a great trademark, but it just never went anywhere. AT&T flubbed its early lead in computing, Unix-like operating systems were pushed by others, and any association with the future that the Bell Labs trademark had just faded. Nostalgically, I love the trademark. But I wouldn't think that anything coming from Bell Labs was cutting edge tech that I wanted (as a consumer, sys admin, or software engineer; in the same way that Nokia makes some great wireless networking hardware, but they aren't making something that I want).

I'm not saying that AT&T and Bell Labs didn't have a huge impact on computing. Bell Labs gave us Unix and C. But it's been a long time since Bell Labs was associated with the next big thing in computing - or the next big thing that anyone wants if they're not coming from the standpoint of telecom infrastructure.

Sometimes companies that were incredibly important just fade away - and their trademarks with them. Motorola and Nokia were once synonymous with cutting edge mobile devices. Today, Nokia has exited the mobile device market and Motorola is a Lenovo brand and a tiny player. Yes, for some years HMD Global bought the rights to the Nokia name from Microsoft (who had the rights for 10 years), but that's now expired and the devices are now HMD branded. Bell Labs just kinda faded away despite us remembering it fondly alongside our Polaroid cameras and Nokia phones.