Lunch at the Labs

Demise of Research at AT&T Labs.

Larry Rabiner the (former) head of Research at AT&T Labs (his last day was the same as mine) was always optimistic about the future of research at AT&T. He had the facts and figures that showed AT&T Labs saved AT&T more more money than it cost to run the Labs. What went wrong?

As I see it, AT&T management got itself into a hole with decisions that cost it billions of dollars (Concert and Excite are just two of the major examples) and the question became not whether AT&T Labs payed for itself but how could they milk the parts that were saving the company lots of money and do away with the rest to make up for mistakes elsewhere and save their undeserving asses.