Xerox "fundamentally was cursed by the Chester Carlson vision," contends its former chief technology officer, Paul Strassmann. "This is the
immaculate conception view that all you have to do is give us the right
technology and the whole world will come to us. Unfortunately, when it
happens like that it's a fluke."
The first generations of post-914 executives were therefore decidedly
unreceptive to a business, like computers, that might grow only slowly
and for which Xerox would have to battle ferociously for every point of
market share. They viewed the Star as the closest thing in computing to
the sainted 914—a machine that could spring fully mature from the
development pipeline, poised to sweep up the entire market and hold it
against all challengers. Had the computer market remained receptive to
$16,000 systems-oriented workstations, the Star might well have dominated. But the market, of course, transformed in the blink of an eye into
something entirely different. Xerox had no machine to compete with
stand-alone desktop workstations costing only $2,000.
Xerox's second burden, too rarely acknowledged by critics of its handling of PARC, was the merciless business environment confronting it
during this period. Only a few months after Peter McColough proclaimed the company's commitment to the "architecture of information"
his company was overwhelmed by war on multiple fronts—new foreign
and domestic competitors, an antitrust investigation by the federal government, and a deteriorating economy. Even a management team seasoned by years of scratching and clawing in competitive markets would
have found these challenges daunting; the serene monopolists of Xerox
were left as disoriented as weekend sailors caught in an ocean squall.
The distractions of the "lost decade" left more by the wayside than
the "architecture of information" battle cry: Although Japanese competitors materialized in force in 1975, Xerox did not introduce a low-
cost machine to rival theirs until four years later. It is not surprising
that Peter McColough and David Kearns, embroiled in the fight of
their lives simply to protect the copier franchise, had scarcely any
patience for the revolutionary solutions being floated for the tough
problems of technology transfer at PARC.
In 1972, for example, Jack Goldman presented McColough with a
novel plan to expedite the manufacture of laser printers by spinning off
an entrepreneurial manufacturing venture. "The idea was to start a little company in the Palo Alto area," Goldman recalled. "Guys were
ready to jump ship and build in garages, assuming Xerox was willing
to
make available the xerographic engines. They would get venture
financing. One-third would go to capital, one-third to the employees,
and one-third to Xerox for providing the
Xerox
machines.
"McColough would absolutely not hear of it at all. His attitude on such
things back in the 1970s was that we could
not
encourage our people to
go off like that when they had a good idea, otherwise we'd lose their loyalty. Of course, they all went off anyway, people like Chuck Geschke and
Bob Metcalfe who went to start their own companies, not to speak of
Charles Simonyi who went off to Microsoft
and
brought Microsoft Word
with him." Today the sort of spinoffs Goldman proposed are commonplace at Xerox. But the company needed
ten
years—and a complete
change of management—to learn that lesson.
Of the many mistakes Xerox committed in handling PARC technology, some were clearly visible in advance, others only in hindsight. Critics should never confuse the two. The former category includes such
blunders as the unnecessary delay in marketing the laser printer and
the repeated rejection of the Alto as an alternative to the nonprogrammable electromechanical word processors manufactured in Dallas.
In the marketing of the Star, however, many decisions that appear
short-sighted or perverse in retrospect made perfect sense at the time.
The Star was designed in part to serve a market many office equipment
pundits of the day expected to thrive for decades: for large-scale, closed,
fully integrated office systems—"turnkey" systems—that would be sold
and serviced exclusively by the vendor
(i.e.,
Xerox). That this architecture
seemed inevitable is unsurprising, for it was the perfect analogue to the
large-scale, closed, turnkey mainframe office data processing systems the
Star would replace.
The Star's software was not designed to be accessible to outside software engineers—as would be that of the IBM PC and the Macintosh
—
for two reasons. One was that no independent software industry existed
at the time. (It would not emerge until the mid-1980s.) The other was
that software was then quite clearly deemed not to be patentable; the
U.S. patent office would not even accept an application. Although it was
possible to copyright particular screen displays and certain sequences of
code, that was a feeble protection against dieft of the intellectual ideas
embodied in the system—as was shown by Apple s unsuccessful lawsuit
against Microsoft for copying the "look and feel" of the Macintosh display
in Windows.
For the most part, the computer scientists and engineers of PARC's
early years are ambivalent about the research center's relationship with
Xerox. They remember the frustrations of trying to communicate the
significance of their inventions to East Coast executives who viewed
them as alien technologies. Yet they cannot forget that Xerox brought
them together, paid them handsomely, and allowed them with considerable forbearance to pursue their own dreams of a personal interactive computer.
Some who have gone on to chair their own corporations or research
labs would not dare to grant their employees the same latitude they
enjoyed themselves. Says Chuck Geschke, co-founder and chairman of
Adobe Systems, "Our attitude at PARC was sort of that it was a higher
calling to do pure research. But here at Adobe our advanced technology
group does not just stay in advanced technology. If they put together the
germ of an idea and start to get it close to prototyping and even decide to
turn it into a product, we encourage them to follow it all the way through
to first customer shipment. The only way I know to transfer technology is
with people."
Others salute their troubled parent for tolerating them as long as it did.
'When SDS crashed and burned Xerox might have decided that all this
electronics stuff isn't what it's cracked up to be, in which case the whole
thing would have disintegrated," observes Butler Lampson. "But in fact
they stuck to their original charter with great tenacity. At least that's the
way it looked to us."
Some were grateful for the opportunity to create, and rather indifferent to the issue of who eventually booked the profits. Still others are
aware that PARC's staff only rarely took the lead in forcing an understanding of the technology upon their corporate bosses.
"All of us who worked there enjoyed blaming Xerox for what went
wrong," observes Bob Metcalfe. "But Xerox gave us the job. Why blame
them? So few of us accepted responsibility."
One last misconception about PARC—indeed, about any research
center engaged in open-ended fundamental research—is that the corporation is somehow obligated to exploit every idea the lab throws off.
In a sufficiently broad-based research program, some ideas will simply
not fit into the corporations business.
"One of Pake's lines was that a great research organization produces
a lot of ideas that its company can't use," says John Shoch. "He was saying that you shouldn't be surprised when the business planners turn
down an idea."
Yet this notion of the corporate research center as a sort of public
benefit, like endowing college scholarships for the needy or underwriting opera performances on television, is the one for which Xerox is
most commonly derided.
"I sometimes wonder now if Xerox isn't unduly pummeled because
they failed to realize such monumental opportunities," Gary Starkweather says. "John Sculley [the former chairman of Apple, where Starkweather worked after leaving PARC] said to me once, 'I don't ever want
a PARC.' I said, 'Why not?' He said, 'All the technology leaked out.' I
said, 'You just want the ability to control such an institution, not to not
have tire institution.'"
But Sculleys view remains the prevalent one. No corporate lab exists
today drat resembles the PARC of the 1970s and 1980s, not even the
PARC of the 1990s, where great advances are being made in physics,
information science, and graphic technologies. There are several reasons
for this, some having to do with the life cycle of technological change. For
the science of computing is no longer at the historic inflection point it
occupied at the start of the 1970s, when every step on the road of discovery was the equivalent of a giant leap into a new world.
A more important reason, however, is that the corporate landscape has
changed, perhaps inalterably. No company, no matter how wealthy, dares
devote even a fraction of its wealth to a search for knowledge that may
not produce a return to the bottom line, as Xerox did. The
Utopian
ideal
of a corporate laboratory whose scientists are free to roam through Idea-
space draws only ridicule today. Consider Microsoft, the company that
comes closest to the Xerox of 1970, at least in terms of its torrential cash
flow. It is no coincidence that Microsoft Research today employs Butler
Lampson, Chuck Thacker, Charles Simonyi, Gary Starkweather, and
Alvy Ray Smith. It is engaged in as explicit an attempt to replicate Xerox
PARC as any company has attempted in recent years. Yet even Bill Gates,
Microsoft's chairman, prefers to define Microsoft Research in terms of
what PARC was not: "We didn't want a situation like Xerox, where the
research was decoupled from product design. [We want] people who are
supersmart but also have a desire to see their work in use."
This does not mean that great discoveries, even surprising ones, will
not be made here and there by researchers working for corporations.
It simply means that a certain quality once possessed by PARC in its
extraordinary early years seems to have departed from the world of science and technology, perhaps forever. Call it magi
c.
Daniel G. Bobrow
is a senior
researcher at
Xerox PARC.