The image above is a photo of a sunset in Florham Park, New Jersey, USA, taken in the 90s.Frenham Park covers an area of more than ten square kilometers, most of which are grasslands and forests. In the middle of the forest is a medium-sized industrial park near a lake—this is the most beautiful industrial park I have ever seen.There, swans can be seen wandering leisurely in the lake every day, and wild deer can be seen from time to time.Originally the property of the oil giant Exxon-Mobil, in 1996, a new owner came here, the American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T) Laboratories. In 1995, the thriving AT&T company was reorganized and split into three companies: AT&T, Lucent and NCR. Bell Laboratories, a world-renowned scientific research institution under AT&T, was also divided into two.Lucent acquired half of the scientific research institutes and the name of Bell Laboratories.Half of the research laboratories assigned to AT&T formed AT&T Laboratories (later renamed Shannon Laboratories), and moved from the original Murray Hills to Frenham Park.There, the AT&T laboratory, which has produced eleven Nobel Prize winners, is like a star entering its later years, bursting out with a very strong but final brilliance, and then quickly dimmed.Ten years later, AT&T and Lucent were acquired by SBC and Alcatel of France respectively.Ten years ago, when I was an intern at AT&T Labs, the mood was high, and the atmosphere in the lab was a lot like Google today.The above beautiful sunset photo was placed next to many people's seats.Thinking about it now, it seems to herald the twilight of an empire.
Speaking of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, that is, AT&T, almost everyone in the United States and even in the world knows and knows.The company was founded in 1877 by Alexander Bell, the father of the telephone.The invention of the telephone and the establishment of AT&T Corporation realized the long-distance and real-time interactive communication of human for the first time (although the telegraph appeared earlier than the telephone, it was not a real interactive communication), and benefited the common people.From the first day AT&T was founded, it was the leader until the day it was acquired.However, AT&T's expansion rate is much slower than people imagine today.It took it fifteen years (1892) to expand its business from the New York area to the Chicago area in the middle of the United States (at that time, the cost of a minute of calls from New York to Chicago was two dollars a minute, and the purchasing power of one dollar at that time was equivalent to five dollars today. Ten dollars. To make an international call in the United States today is only ten cents a minute).Thirty-eight years later (1915), its business spread across the country (but calls from New York to San Francisco cost seven dollars a minute).Forty-eight years later, in 1927, AT&T's long-distance business expanded to Europe.
In 1925, Bell Laboratories, a research and development institution established by AT&T Corporation.Bell Labs is the largest and most successful privately owned laboratory in history.Because AT&T has obtained huge monopoly profits from the telecommunications industry, it took 3% of its output value for Bell Labs' research and development work. (For a long time, people in Bell Labs have always used the reason that they don't need to worry about funding to attract outstanding scientists to work in the laboratory) , Transistors and semiconductors, computer science and other fields lead the world.In addition to the telephone itself, its famous inventions also include radio astronomy telescopes, transistors, electronic switches, the Unix operating system for computers, and the C language, among others.In addition, Bell Labs also discovered the volatility of electrons, invented information theory, launched the first communication satellite, and laid the first commercial optical fiber.For quite a long time, Bell Labs was not only the preferred workplace for scientists in the field of information, but also a place where scholars in the field of basic research flocked to.Those who entered Bell Labs in that era were very lucky.If it is a person, he can become a leader in the industry, and even get a Nobel Prize, Shannon Award or Turing Award.Even ordinary researchers and engineers will have good income, reliable retirement protection and respected social status.
AT&T had a monopoly in the U.S. and (via Nortel) control of the Canadian phone business for a long time.In 1984, according to the requirements of the federal antitrust law, AT&T's local telephone business was divided into seven small Bell companies according to the region.The seven small Bell companies were in the local telephone business, while AT&T was in the long-distance telephone business and the manufacture of communication equipment.Bell Labs was assigned to AT&T, and a part of Bell Labs, called Bell Core (Bell Core), was assigned to seven small Bell companies.Soon, because the seven monks had no water to drink, the Bell core was soon launched on the stage of history, which is of course a later story.
Now, most people believe that this is the beginning of AT&T's decline.But I don't think AT&T is hurt by it.In fact, over the next decade, AT&T's business grew considerably.Although it has lost the local telephone service, as a communication equipment supplier, it is still almost the only supplier of local telephone communication equipment.Moreover, although there are two long-distance telephone competitors, MCI and Sprint, AT&T still controls most of the U.S. market, and its profits are very considerable, enough to maintain the high research and development expenses of Bell Labs, making AT&T still ahead of the world in communication and semiconductor technology .By 1994, its turnover reached nearly 70 billion US dollars, roughly equivalent to the combined turnover of it and SBC today.
This year, Dr. John Mayer, the president of Bell Labs, led a large-scale delegation to visit China. President Jiang Zemin personally received him, which is enough to show the importance attached to AT&T.It may be unprecedented for the Chinese President to meet with the president of a subsidiary of a company. AT&T was at its peak.
If the 1984 split didn't hurt AT&T, what caused its decline?
