It's also a lesson that always seems to fail to be learned. Xerox had the capital to set up a research arm, then failed to convert on any ideas because they were too focused on their current cash-cow. They eventually transitioned to "document company" where a document wasn't only paper, but it was too little/late.
xerox parc in the 70s invented the laser printer. the laser printer has been almost all of xerox's business since last millennium. their current revenues are 7 billion dollars a year, almost entirely from laser printers (mostly in disguise.) so i'm not sure it was 'too little, too late' or even 'failing to convert'
(right now i think xerox is unprofitable, but that's an issue of profit margins and management, not an issue of not having revenue)
> From a purely economic standpoint, Xerox’s investment in PARC for its first decade was returned with interest by the profits from the laser printer.
and that was in 01985
you could posit an alternative history where xerox wasn't just making billions of dollars a year, for generations, out of laser printers, but also owned the entire market of laser printers, semiconductor foundries, guis with overlapping windows, ethernet, wysiwyg document editing, page description languages, and object-oriented programming, because all of those were indeed invented at parc
the article does in fact implicitly posit that alternative history. but it isn't clear that it was ever a possible history. centrally planned economies are not good at innovation; decentralized ones are. the most significant invention on that list, the semiconductor foundry, isn't even technical; it's a business structure that decentralizes chip design
very possibly they've made more money from their early stock in apple than they ever could have made by trying to exclude everyone else from the overlapping-window-gui market
The way I read this is that it's like how Microsoft missed out on mobile even after making Windows Phone by underestimating just how important it was as a future market.