[rchiang]

I think it's important to note that much (all?) of PARCs research has been oriented around the "office of the future". In the broadest sense of that vision, they had a huge hand in originating a lot of computing technologies.

And while SRI has had their impact in the computing industry, they also have other research labs that have very little to do with computing such as biomedical, education, and policy.

[fatneckbeard]

sri was never gonna allow a bunch of hippies and bearded longhairs tour their facility in the spirit of academic comradeship. (IE no microsoft, no apple being allowed to walk around and talk to people in the 80s to get the ideas for Macintosh and Windows)

Ironically, Apple and Microsoft would never allow some stranger company to walk into their offices and see everything they were developing either. lol

[retrocryptid]

By the time apple was founded, many (most) of the people doing research that would be of interest to Jobs had already moved over to PARC. Larry Tesler springs immediately to mind, but Thierry Bardini's book on Engelbart has a more complete list. After the ARC fell apart in 1970, PARC was launching and was a natural place for them to land.

[AlbertCory]

Xerox had two meetings with Apple, in December 1979. Neither they nor Microsoft was ever able to "walk into their offices and see everything they were developing ."

[smilespray]

Come on. Xerox gave away the crown jewels in those meetings.

[AlbertCory]

https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

"It's a good story. Unfortunately, it's also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong."

Full details at https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

and there are many other references on the Web about that visit.

[mnky9800n]

That first link was a fascinating read. I guess you wrote books about it?

[AlbertCory]

Thanks!

Inventing the Future forbids any hindsight. No one knows how it will turn out.

Hence the title: what if we DO allow hindsight?

[fatneckbeard]

yeah well my original point still stands.

"PARC was not at all secretive about its work. Its researchers published widely, and there was a regular flow of traffic between PARC and Stanford's computer science community. "

as opposed to a military intelligence company where all that would get you fired if not in prison.

[AlbertCory]

I don't know what you're quoting. I was there, though.

[lallysingh]

Defense research publishes a lot of science too.

[retrocryptid]

Xerox was paid for the crown jewels and according to Larry Tesler, it didn't take any arm-twisting to get him to move to Apple as Xerox was dragging their feet commercializing PARC's innovations.

[pnw]

Xerox received Apple stock for those meetings which they sold in the IPO. I’ve never seen anyone do a calculation of the present value of that stock but it’s probably a significant fraction of Xerox’s market cap today.

[AlbertCory]

I'm pretty sure it was sold a long time ago.

However, in here: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

I calculate some of the other PARC spinoffs they did. If they'd held onto all of it, it would dwarf the value of the copier & printer business.

[rchiang]

Nice post there. There's definitely a lot of 20/20 hindsight that people apply to PARC's history with respect to computing.

It's clear that just the investments that Xerox did have would have been huge had they just held on to them. That's ignoring what they could have done had cashed out less conservatively and reinvested in ongoing technology concerns the same way that Intel Capital or Google Ventures has.

Beyond that, it would have been beyond epic for Xerox to have had all the right pieces to replace a huge chunk of the high tech ecosystem by itself. Each of the successes that "should have belonged to PARC" involves VCs, hundreds or thousands of employees, business pivots, decades of existence, and plain luck and timing.

Hank Chesborough's (formerly of Harvard Business School, at Berkeley Haas School of Business last I checked) lists 35 companies that spun out of Xerox in "The Governance and Performance of Xerox's Technology Spin-Off Companies". Just that level of brain drain/distraction was bad enough at times for PARC's ongoing work.

[pnw]

Thanks, interesting read. I guess the decision to sell all of those 100,00 shares at the Apple IPO was a pretty expensive blunder.