Parc just didn't capitalize on what they had. I know the Alto was expensive, but still seems like a huge shame.
> Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.”
Xerox clearly undervalued the research they were producing, but it wasn't like they just gave it away entirely. Per [2] the valuation of those shares in 2018 would be $1.2 billion had they not sold them - undervalued in hindsight, but not nothing.
Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth
[2]: https://researchnarrative.com/thinkerry/the-company-that-cou...
What I said was that it worked out a lot better for Jobs than it did Xerox, not that they didn't get anything. It certainly didn't work out how they'd hoped. And that hasn't gone unnoticed by would-be funders of future Xerox PARCs.
> Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.
I dunno, to me it feels like the people who are good at doing and investing in basic research are not the same kind of people who are good at building and investing in applications. Yes you can present a counterfactual where if only Xerox had Jobs' vision and execution everything could have been different... but chalking it up to just "they could have done it better and been successful" misses the fact that they were doing the best they could with the smartest people they could find, and still couldn't capitalize.
So what you're saying here is that the best thing to come out of PARC for Xerox was an incremental improvement to their existing product line that could have been proposed by a typical R&D team.
Again, not a great selling point for the ROI of PARC from Xerox's perspective.
Laser printers were a central part of the computerized mass-customized printing of things like insurance policies and bank statements that happened in the 70's and were definitely a revolutionary change in what kind of problem Xerox was solving for their customers.
But I'm not saying laser printers weren't a great thing, I'm saying it doesn't take setting up a research playground like PARC to get that kind of result.
Laser printers are the kind of improvement typical R&D comes up with. Xerox's customers wanted more speed and quality out of their printers, laser printers got them that. It's not exactly clear that a typical R&D wouldn't/couldn't have come up with that. Apple for instance does this kind of R&D all the time, and they're very good at it.
Xerox PARC wasn't about getting the next incremental improvement in speed and quality for printers, it was about inventing the office of the future. But the office of the future doesn't require laser printers or printers of any kind. PARC's vision was that Xerox's core business would be eliminated, and that's precisely why Xerox couldn't be the one to actually capitalize on PARC research.
> were definitely a revolutionary change
I would say going from dot matrix printers to laser printers is an incremental change; whereas something more revolutionary would be going from dot matrix printers to no printers at all because you don't need them since you have e-mail and the Internet.
A loss for whom? Society? Of course, and that's exactly why they don't happen anymore -- because while they were a boon for society they were a terrible bet for the company. And when a company has a choice between doing good for their bottom line or doing good for society, 100% of the time they choose their bottom line.
I mean, look at the legacy of Xerox Parc from Xerox's perspective. They invited this guy in, Steve Jobs, and he commercialized their ideas. Today Xerox is worth pennies on the dollar compared to their height, doing none of what Xerox Parc researched. Apple ate their lunch. The ROI for Xerox Parc was terrible for Xerox.
For all the amazing stuff they did, they were not rewarded by the marketplace for it, they didn't produce better products for themselves, they just did other companies' R&D.
That's where universities come in, and where they are vital. If you take them out, their role will not be filled by corporations, because corpos can't stomach the kind of dollars needed to do fundamental research. Only the government can stomach that, and if somehow the voters are convinced all this isn't worth funding, it just won't happen at any level.