"I worked at Bell Labs for several years, I left just shortly after they broke it AT&T. I know its history quite well." What's doubly amusing is to stand by and watch as the Baby Bells re-assemble themselves by merger - minus the top-heavy AT&T structure. They still do have, however, that incredibly arrogant AT&T attitude.
Which is why MY niche works so well. My customers are small-to-medium business that want the top-notch Avaya product without paying Fortune 500 prices and dealing with the Avaya attitude (one thing that divestiture couldn't stop them from holding over.) We save them the grief and the money.
Michael
Well whatever the plus in the telecomm business sector, the Nation is worse of for the passing of the old Bell labs. They hardly do any basic research anymore - they are a shadow of what they once were. That type a basic, "quantum leap" research is not being done much in this country now, and what is is mostly down the paths of what was already done. I am talking about things like the transistor, the laser, microwave, telecom satellites etc. We live in another world now. Universities do not have the money and most firms so not have the attention span for this sort of work. It required a semi-regulated monopoly to get these sort of things done. The "attitude" that you speak of is more a reelection of the fact that AT&T was a sort of national utility prior to Charlie Brown, not some sort of innate vileness of character.
The transition could have been smother, we lost another national asset. But know since we seem to think that we can move our entire technology industry overseas I guess it does not matter (that one strikes me as pretty arrogant.)