Lucent & Alcatel

As everyone may have heard by now, Lucent Technologies and Alcatel are on the way to wedded corporate bliss.  You can read about it at this link here.  This is probably a good thing for them financially.  Lucent’s profits were coming more from their pension plan investments than from their business, and that couldn’t have gone on much longer really.  From a technology standpoint, it looks like it makes sense.  Alcatel now has a wireless play when before they did not.  Also, Lucent’s Professional Services organization gives Alcatel a boost up since Alcatel didn’t really have one before. 

I think for me though, it’s a sad loss of the Bell Labs Research Institution.  I’m all for companies being stronger and more able (though frankly the record of that happening in mega mergers like this is very low, please see stories about the lack of success of megamergers here @ C/net, and here @ HBR).  But the United State’s private corporate labs (such as Bell Labs) and our public labs (such as Lawrence Livermore) are national treasures that helped keep our country a technology leader.  For sure, Bell Labs won’t disappear and the defense piece will be kept in tact under U.S. influence.  Still, this just feels like a sort of dismantling of some national treasures.

What were the causes of Lucent’s demise?  Probably too many to list, but there’s a well done article on this by Chinese blogger  Dr.Richard Zhao Liang (赵粮) that is well worth a read.  You can see his article at this link here.