Thing is… why wouldn’t we want product-relevant stuff? I mean… hating commerce is definitely a thing around here but the economy equates to the standard of living of humans. The ability to eat healthy foods, and enough to avoid malnutrition; to stay warm in winter and cool in summer (and thereby avoid death); to travel quickly and efficiently for economic, academic, leisure, or other reasons… these are all very important things that result from corporate research. People crap on it, but if any one of these things hadn’t happened half the humans alive today may well have died before age 10.

Wikipedia's article on Bell Labs has a long list of stuff that came out of it. Some of it's stuff they made money off of, some is stuff other people made money off of. Some of it's stuff other people made money off of that ended up also creating a lot of traffic on Bell's networks.