As the Bard said:
Dog goes 'woof', cat goes 'meow'
Bird goes 'tweet' and mouse goes 'squeek'
Cow goes 'moo', frog goes 'croak'
And the elephant goes 'toot'
But this is true in only the English language. In other human languages, animal vocalizations are pronounced differently--albeit sometimes only slightly.
Vivian Li of The Pudding has charts with soundboards illustrating the onomatopoeia that express different animal sounds, including cats, ducks, and pigs. She goes into an astonishing amount of detail about the phonetic mechanics involved in making each sound in each language and draws connections between them despite these different languages originating around the world.
-via Flowing Data
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It certainly doesn't mean nothing. Lots of things are discovered and yet don't find mainstream (or any) uses for many years.
Given its size and deep connection to society, had AT&T decided to develop a magnetic tape machine for business and consumer use in the 1930s rather than be fearful of it, the impact of such actions could have been significant indeed, if only for introducing consumer answering machines 25 years or so earlier.
Meh, it's what corperations do.