Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel

Rating:
Summary: Useful info, bad book
Review: Clear sentences in plain language have much to commend them--but stringing together a few thousand of them doesn't make a book.

A book needs a "narrative arc," an underlying dynamic that sets out and develops a point of view. Even non-fiction (perhaps especially non-fiction) needs to unfold in an orderly manner, carrying the reader along by posing conflicts, raising questions, addressing both by adducing facts and insights, all in a way that creates a coherent whole that persuades the reader. Ideally, the point of view should signify something--it should help the reader think intelligently about something that matters.

Gehani's point of view seems to be, "Gee, I worked at this legendary place, that used to be one thing but now is another, and that's sad but understandable. A lot of stuff happened, and here's some of it, in no particular order."

If Gehani has reflected on his experience and learned anything of interest, he keeps it to himself. If he has any significant insights into the issues of basic versus industrial research, the imperatives of science versus the imperatives of profit, the problem of funding science in a free, capitalist society--that is, if he has anything more than mundane commonplaces, he hasn't bothered to share it here. Anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of the transtion from AT&T to Lucent can, in about ten minutes, come up with all the insight Gehani gleaned from years of intimate experience of the place.

If you need a compilation of basic info about its subject, "Bell Labs" is a useful tool. If you want to learn aything more significant, forget it.

Rating:
Summary: Mildly interesting
Review: Crown Jewels describes the evolution of Bell Labs from the gravy-train days under the Ma Bell monopoly to its struggling to stay alive under the faltering Lucent. Aside from back and forth chronology that confused me at times, I found the book to be well-written. However, I don't know that the material is worthy of a book. The entire volume is really summed up in one sentence: Life at Bell Labs was like academia until after the divestiture, and then no one at either Bell Labs, AT&T, the RBOCs, or Lucent really knew how to harness its energy. As somewhat of an industry insider, I was hoping for more details of its products and innovations, but such information was hit-and-miss -- the author talked about "MapsOnUs" in detail, but quickly blew over other products like VoIP and Softswitch.

Rating:
Summary: Jewels missing from the Crown
Review: There are good and bad sides to this account of the legendary Bell Labs.
On the good side, this book is definitely a _must_ to the BL "diaspora", people who spent some 5-10 years of their life there, but did not choose it for lifetime. This is true especially for those who experienced the real pioneer era, i.e. when research was still under AT&T funding without business pressure, and at the birth of optical communications, a field that BL carried to the full end, in spite of many other useful or useless but high research achievements. Good times indeed from 1945 to until the 1990s for talented and die-hard investigators. As one Holmdel veteran wrote it once "..it was hard believing that you could be paid to have so much fun".

The book is very interesting when showing the transformation from this legendary research system model into the new-and-ugly market-oriented one. Regrettably enough, the author puts emphasis on the more politically-correct later stage, instead of telling us what was good and personal in the earlier one. Yet, he provides a vivid account of his (seemingly mild ?) tribulations to get the scientific nerds and egoes under him through such a cultural painstaking transformation, especially when he strove to develop a viable and interesting product which unfortunately failed to interest the blind Top. In the concluding sections, he courageously mentions the infamous fraud that marred this respected institution (but it could be a "vaudoo" trick as well to avoid really adressing the core of the issue: scientific dishonesty as a mushroom on a decaying environment). In spite of many repeats and heavy commonplaces "scientific- vs. market-oriented research problem, or the reverse, and again never really solved", it is written in a soft and agreeable style, with that touch of personal and sincere account that makes you want to read the book to the end (could CS engineers of the world unite and follow such a writing example).

On the less good side, there is way too much lip service to the author's past line/patriarchal hierarchy: basically GOD, as incidentally represented by VP research, then N+2 and N+1 or self, yielding annoying or meaningless expressions such as "the post-(my boss)BL", and so on. For any experienced-writer viewpoint, the final edition looks embarassingly perfect and rosy, in spite of some episodic 'disagreements' and other ego-tantrum lullabies. But the reader may forgive the author's sincere epitaph for the "great" bosses that made up his career, and understandably, that book is a dedication to them. (now are these heroes really dead, or enjoying happy lives in California start-ups instead ? We may surely save our tears in the latter case). We would have liked to know more about the causes that precipitated the doom of Telecoms, as viewed by the seemingly unique institution in charge. The competition and ROW must have been following in daily angst the Murray Hill saga, with its waltz of questionable promotions and friendly departures. Overall, it looks like the author stayed inside a fall-out shelter during all the events that got the market and stocks down to where it still lags. The painstaking story of the N-vestiture of the BL hologram, which gives a conceptual ground to the book, is alas no substitute to a real personal 20-years account. Maybe when the author was a post-doc researcher doing science and papers in his laboratory keyboard, hoping to get to the boss position, could we have learned something about the Crown Jewel times. Unfortunately, this is where the intimate story is skipped, and thus the official one (taht the reader is offered) starts with the "day after" the demise of the Crown, and the Jewels in the process of running away.

At the beginning of his book, the author is very honest (say at least careful) to mention his lack of knowledge of non-CS activities at BL. But nevertheless he seems to praise Raman amplifiers (invented in Germany, France and Japan in the 80s, notwithstanding the discovery of SRS in fibers at Holmdel in the 70s) while remaining blind to the discovery/development of the erbium fiber amplifier at the BL Holmdel facilities. Such an event triggered the entire WDM revolution and generated billions of revenues for the new market-oriented BL BUs, their subsidiaries and an opportunistic submarine branch in particular.

The author was probably not interested in the history of BL to such an extent, past his office/coffee-machine loft at Murray Hill. A bit more curiosity and less self-centeredness would have been a plus for such an otherwise very commendable personal account.

This lack of curiosity about other fields, due to internal competition, rivalry or complete indifference between BL sites, was typical of the older BL regime. This book thus indirectly provides an unwanted homage to these lesser-known and shadowy aspects of the Labs. But glamour of the past is also important for little boys and girls.

One star yet for "buy" in a 1/0 decision space.