[TheOtherHobbes]

PARC wasn't just a ridiculous concentration of money and very smart people with a budget, it was a ridiculous concentration of money and very smart people who had creativity and vision.

There's nothing like it today, because the only vision you'll find in the current crop of smart+budget shops is how to make more cash from ads and/or the web.

Even at SpaceX, the getting-to-Mars vision is more than fifty years old.

PARC was about enhancing human creativity, cognition, and potential, and everything else came from that.

Not only is no one is working in that space today, but all the big smart+budget shops are more likely to pollute that space than contribute to it.

[stickfigure]

This is unreasonably uncharitable.

I have doubts about its commercial viability, but Magic Leap seems pretty ambitious. Microsoft has been exploring all kinds of exotic technologies, some of which make it into production (kinect, hololens) and some of which don't (the original 'surface'). Alphabet has a bunch of moonshots that sound like vanity projects to me but if even one of them works out it may change the world (Waymo seems closest). Even the much-maligned Google Glass is a preview of the future.

It sounds like your standard for creativity and vision requires rewinding time to a more naive state. Peter Norton made a fortune by selling software that would undelete files. At the time it was amazing!

[danso]

I agree that Microsoft is doing some interesting work (including in open source) that may cause more buzz if Microsoft wasn’t saddled with the legacy of Windows and cubicle computing. I wonder how exciting/sexy Xerox’s corporate image was back in the heyday of Xerox PARC?

[Aloha]

PARC also had a huge amount of trouble commercializing any of its work - part of it was the intrenched bureaucracy at Xerox, and the way Xerox looked at products and sales. That said, the Laser Printer alone, paid for the money spent on PARC several times over.