KITTEN CLONE
Douglas Coupland, Visual Editions, 172 pages, $40
Alcatel-Lucent employs about 62,000 people in 130 countries, building and maintaining the networks that make it possible to watch "House of Cards" on your mobile phone while commuting to work. It holds 12 Nobel Prizes in the sciences, with subsidiaries that include the famed Bell Labs.
Yet the French company is rarely mentioned in the breathless tech press — for good reason. World-changing inventions have dried up. In its last full year, it generated just under $18 billion in revenue and made losses of about a tenth of that.
Douglas Coupland, who has been writing about the relationship between technology and society for nearly two decades, wisely chooses against dwelling on the technicalities of networking. Watching the dreary business of laying optical fiber cables off the coast of France is "as entrancing as watching insolent teenagers chew gum."
Alcatel's Paris headquarters are hardly more glamorous. But it gives Coupland a chance to hear from Ben Verwaayen, Alcatel's boss until last year. "Look what happened to Kodak," he says. "We need to constantly ask ourselves, 'How do we stay relevant?' " Good question. Verwaayen resigned after failing to turn the company around.
Coupland also goes to Shanghai, home to Alcatel's manufacturing and another research lab. But it is more of the same. Alcatel-Lucent's engineers on three continents identify increasing bandwidth and speed as the most important innovations for the future. Few mention the fundamental research that made its research labs wellsprings of invention. The future that Alcatel-Lucent created is here. But the company itself is struggling to keep up.
THE ECONOMIST
