[shon]

PARC, though awesome for society, was a massive commercial failure for Xerox.

As tech nerd, I love the lore of The PARC and went to visit it as soon as I moved to the Bay Area.

However, I assume it would be taught as a lesson of what not to do in a business context:

Investing in pure research often yields innovations that are opposed to existing business lines or simply too far out to see as useful by management.

That said, many companies have research arms. Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Meta, Google…

[vajrabum]

Uh no. Xerox made billions from the laser printer. And yes they missed capturing all the profit but it was crazy profitable. https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2015/03/21/how-parc-...

[shon]

Hmm, thanks for the interesting article. Probably knew that at one time but forgot lol.

Still, it shows my point, that research that reaches too far from the company’s core biz is difficult to recognize as a success. The laser printer, was a better printer and it was an improvement to Xerox existing scan+print business.

Bell Labs also had a lot of commercial success.

[yawboakye]

when a business has an r&d department it's inherently suicidal to consider any current activity as ‘core biz’ especially in a competition. your research department’s objective is to move the puck into new locations, hopefully evading your competitors, and your job as mother institution is to skate there. settling into any so-called core business is contra good business thinking. starting an r&d department isn’t.

[infinite8s]

Makes you wonder how the mythos that Xerox dropped the ball with PARC is so pervasive in our culture, or that it was net unprofitable. Probably the early scrappy 'garage engineering' mythology surrounding Apple plays into it?

[jrowen]

Lesson: Don't develop innovations that are too advanced for management to understand, because they will pass and let the rest of the world eat their lunch.

[anonymouskimmer]

I think the actual lesson learned was to develop these research departments as incubators where the inventors are expected, and trained, to become entrepreneurs who spin out companies that the parent company owns part of.

It would have been easier to just make some of the inventors upper-level managers and executives of the parent company.

Given the cost of the original Xerox computer, Apple still may have eaten their lunch. Apple itself spent a lot of effort getting the Macintosh, expensive as it was, as cheap as it was.

[yawboakye]

not really. from my study (of both xerox and other companies with similar fate), it’s success that killed them. when you have a hugely successful product that people can’t seem to live without, and businesses can’t operate without, it’s extraordinarily difficult to plan and execute its demise in favor of something new. your business executives, skilled in the arts of racing to bottom lines, won’t side with you. they’d rather go down with the ship than keep jumping every 5 years or so.

edit: goes without saying that the best time to take on any largely successful company is approximately a decade from when they’ve been successful. that is to say, we’re on the cusps of a better payments api (ie stripe of this decade), better email (37signal’s hey), better e-commerce, etc.

[anonymouskimmer]

From what I had gathered, today's VC incubators and academic-affiliated incubators work on the inventor -> entrepreneur model (or at least entrepreneur -> inventor model).