Reinventing Xerox PARC As a Money Maker

bonch writes "After a historical reputation for not monetizing breakthrough technologies (including the mouse and desktop GUI), Xerox PARC is now focused on making money from its inventions. CEO Anne Mulcahy vowed in 2001 to return the company to profitability, encouraging 'open innovation' and mandating that research turned a profit. The latest innovation is thin-film printed electronics, intended for a variety of products, from RFID readers to price labels."

Comments

Is that really their job?

[CaptainLard]

Is it a researcher's job to make a profit? The point of research is to learn something new, whether it works or not. Then its up to the business side to decide what to do with it. Perhaps instead of mandating that PARC must make money, the management should mandate they make smarter decisions on which inventions are marketable or not instead of giving away the mouse and GUI. Hows that 11 year old quest to return to profitability going?

Re:Is that really their job?

[boristdog]

Research is a tough game. I used to work at a research consortium that was funded by several large corporations. In their heyday in the 80's they made a ton of money inventing actual new things (Diamondvision was one) and spun off successful companies with each big commercial invention. But a lot of the research was pretty humdrum and just went to improved technology (and patents) for the funding companies. Some of the research was promising but still hasn't really paid off. Much of that has been transferred to other organizations since the demise of the organization.

<Rant>
How did it die? Someone though it would be good to run it more like a corporation with a big name CEO who knew nothing about technology - seriously, the guy's secretary had to print out his e-mails for him to read, and she typed his handwritten responses back into the computer. He brought on more clueless fucktards at the executive level...and eventually they all bankrupted a well-funded non-profit organization with their huge salaries, perks, bonuses and some outright theft. I managed to leave just a few weeks before one of the executive staff just took several million and left. Because of the dirt he had on the other execs, he was never prosecuted. They are the 1%.

</Rant>

Lingo

[Dyinobal]

Is 'making money from it's inventions' code for suing people for patent infringement and patenting every dumb little thing possible. Or will they actually being doing something productive?

Re:CEO Still There!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. As a former Xeroid who worked with senior management and around a certain place in Palo Alto my studied opinion is that they have no chance in Hell. They pissed away lots of talent and money so that those left at PARC are either waiting to retire or useless academics escaped from a university. Xerox Management, especially Mulcahy burned so many people and bridges that nothing good will ever come from Xerox again.

A friend worked for Xerox in 1984

[MichaelCrawford]

Not at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, but in Pasadena. He was a fellow Caltech student.

They had a color photocopier under development that printed on paper the size of an unfolded newspaper.

Now of course he wasn't supposed to, but just for grins he photocopied one side of a twenty dollar bill. He showed me both the original and the photocopy. I was completely unable to tell the difference between the two.

Now this was in 1984. How many of you are old enough to recall what photocopiers were like in 1984? I don't think color copiers even existed outside the laboratory.

Xerox could be bigger and richer than Microsoft, Intel and Apple all put together if they had ever gotten products like that into the market.

When was Xerox PARC founded? In the 1960s? And only just now they're thinking they should make a profit with it?

Apple's ATG - Advanced Technology Group - was well-known for just the same kind of nonsense. They were always showing off incredible new products at developer conferences, such as tablet computers with handwriting recognition, but they were reknowned for never actually bringing any of those companies to market.

Contrast this with Bell Labs that among many other valuable, money-making products, invented the Transistor.

The Apple Lisa had that same problem

[MichaelCrawford]

I remember like it was yesterday when I saw one demonstrated at a computer store. But because I was but a starving student, and the Lisa had a whole megabyte of memory and what for the day was quite a large, bright monochrome graphics display, I knew that I wouldn't have the ten grand to actually buy one any time soon.

The original Macintosh was a largely successful attempt to fix the problem of the Lisa's exhorbitant retail price. The "1984 Superbowl Ad" Macintosh just had 128 kb of RAM and a 512 by 342 monochrome display. The model I eventually bought used had just a single-sided 400 KB floppy and no hard drive.

It was not possible to develop real software on the original Macintosh. Instead developers used cross-compilers with Lisas as the host.