[strangeloops85]

I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while, and this just seems like a way for them to do it and get a tax write-off since it's a 'donation'. PARC has already been doing a lot of government contract work, and I've seen teams from PARC and SRI compete for certain programs, so there's definitely synergy there. But I think PARC was historically more commercially oriented than SRI, so there will be some cultural differences internally.

Over time Xerox has gone quite far from where it was when PARC was founded and I think internal support for it had weakened a lot.

The bigger problem both orgs have historically had is on compensation and retaining talent. A lot of people tend to leave or get poached by major companies and their R&D units - lots of former PARC folks at X, and lots of former SRI folks across various robotics companies.

[rchiang]

Xerox went through the process of making PARC a wholly-owned subsidiary in 2002 (which is around the time the parc.com domain was created to replace the parc.xerox.com subdomain). This was presumably as part of trying to sell of PARC, in part or as a whole.

Xerox's revenue has been slowly declining over that time (~$15B from 2002-2009, ~$20B 2010-2013, ~$10B 2014-2019, ~$7B 2020-2023). There's likely a few business-related reasons they are doing this donation now.

[nickt]

Talking of registering domains, xerox.com was the 7th registered .com, and SRI was the 8th - less than a week apart in January 1986.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...

[rbanffy]

> I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while

I wonder why some corporations don't see the value of R&D, or even "incidental" R&D, when you develop something revolutionary while you work on something profitable.