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.
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.
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.
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).
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.