It was kept remarkably quiet. That site in particular received a lot of support from the IDA over the years so I can't imagine they were too happy about it. BLI was told year on year that it was a top performing site. Then a few months into lockdown they pulled the rug out from under everyone.

Were they working on products? Any examples?

I’d already left a couple of years. Most Bell Labs stuff is closer to research than development anyway.

That's what i thought also which is why I was curious it was considered top performing. I suppose there are metrics other than profitability to define performance.

KPIs related to patents, academic papers, contributions to various projects and yes technologies for products. The Irish site was always aware of its isolation from the mothership and usually went above and beyond.

I heard one Bell Labs scientist observe that labs like that pay for themselves many times over if someone only rarely invents something great, like the transistor.

It seems to me that if one were desperately looking for an objective measurement of what the lab was currently accomplishing, it would involve looking at the quality and retention of its hires. It sounds like they dropped the ball.

They were told the reason was that Bell Labs is moving to a start up model (whatever that is) and that means closing some sites other than NJ. Then the head of Bell Labs was fired along with the CEO of Nokia.

Basically Alcatel-Lucent was broke and was bought out by Nokia with Microsoft money. Nokia is now also broke and they're pawning the good silver.