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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."
Talk about creepy timing.
Jacob Goldman, Founder of Xerox Lab, Dies at 90
In this article they even discuss criticisms of Xerox not commercializing technologies developed at PARC.
Another corporation similar to Rambus which invents stuff and then demands royalties for licenses and patents. Just what we needed for economic growth!
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?
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?
.... where Xerox marketed the Xerox Alto as the first commercial GUI driven computer in 1973? I'm guessing technology would have advanced to todays levels by the early 90s, MIcrosoft most likely wouldn't exist as the IBM PC would never have been developed, at least not in its initial form, and even Apple would probably have faded away after managing to sell a few "old fashioned" Apple I & 2s in the mid 70s.
But - would the 8bit home computers have existed? If not then the huge 80s influx of hobbyists into programming would never have happened.
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.
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.
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The funding councils that back research at UK universities now require an 'impact' plan; evidence that what is being funded will have a 'positive' impact in terms of society and commercial interest. This was brought in by the previous government, and backed by the current one. At the time most researchers were set against it, pointing out that so many of the inventions and discoveries that have been so beneficial to us all came not from a will to research a specific issue, but from something else, and hence little more than an accident.
I thinks it's troubling that the idea of research for its own sake seems to be dying. In effect we're limiting the overall breadth of investigation, and perhaps that will result in fewer 'useful' discoveries after all.
Does this mean Xerox has a chance?
Xerox PARC hasn't existed for a long time. PARC was sold off. It is not affiliated with Xerox and lacks most of what made Xerox PARC cool in the first place.
Oh, and it's a mistake to say, as TFA claims, that PARC was famous for failing to commercialise its inventions. I can think of at four things off the top of my head that made Xerox more money than the total operating costs of PARC for the entire time that Xerox ran it.
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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.
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PARC was sold off.
You should have told them that as they don't seem to know. In fact, they even contradict your position on their website: PARC - A Xerox company.
Damn companies keep thinking they know who they are better than Slashdotters that don't even RTFS, much less RTFA.
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Forget all the patent and IP insanity that goes on in the modern world for a minute, and think about what it means for a company to do its own basic research. Companies did R&D because they knew products come and go, and that they would profit handsomely if something their researchers discovered was key to a profitable product. I think that philosophy comes from a time when companies were run for the long term rather than a few quarters into the future. Today, only the big boys can really support their own R&D divisions, such as IBM, Microsoft and GE. HP and Xerox used to have big R&D facilities, and Bell Labs was the biggest of the big, but now the demand to keep shareholders happy outstrips the need to keep the idea pipeline stocked. Today's corporate research is backed by huge piles of money, just as it used to be, simply because you're investing in something that is very capital intensive and doesn't involve a guaranteed payout. Anyone who's taken Corporate Finance 101 knows about the cost-benefit analysis and "which project should we fund given 20 altenatives" exercises the MBAs go through. Add angry shareholders to the mix, most of whom don't care about the company's longevity, and it's no wonder research doesn't get the funds it used to.
One advantage that corporate labs have over university or government labs is their science/engineering focus. It may be basic research, but the reality is that it's mostly in the company's field and ties in neatly with the current or future product lines. I'll use Bell Labs as an example...AT&T used their telephone monopoly, which generated vast sums of money, to fund basic research. That led them to invent the transistor, which (surprise, surprise) was very useful in early telephone switching equipment, and in modern electronics in general. Digital switching dropped the cost of providing phone service, and enabled new technologies that just couldn't exist in the old analog-switched network. Other inventions such as the UNIX operating system and others had wide-ranging implications for technology in general, but at their core they were used to improve the company's products and services.
I think that corporate research is probably going to end up relegated to privately-held firms who make boatloads of predictable income every year, and can afford to fund it. The current stock market just doesn't allow for this to go on...wild gyrations every single day, plus the fact that people and institutions trade in and out of stocks every second, not every 10 years like they used to. That's the thing that's different -- money is still available, but no one wants to plow it into something that doesn't give an immediate payout.
You don't have to monetize everything, you know. It is possible to use one unprofitable department to improve revenues of others. Have a spine and stop worrying about next quarter more than next year.
An idea I've had for a long time is that corporate executives shouldn't be paid based on the quarterly stock price, as is so often the case, but the stock price five years from now.
One way to do that would be to still pay them with options, but they would be contractually forbidden to sell the stock until five years after each vesting.
If they had exercised their options in the meantime, they would still get dividends. That's the way it should be - companies should drive investment by actually earning profits, not through market manipulations that drive up short-term stock prices.
I once worked for a privately-held hedge fund that had a software package that I referred to as "A License To Print Money". While not perfectly accurate, it did a pretty good job of predicting the commodities futures market.
There were just two dozen employees of that company which invested just one very wealthy guy's cash, but even so they traded in ONE THOUDAND different commodities. They got real-time quotes via a high-speed point-to-point wireless link to an ISP in a nearby city, which I imagine was tied into the Internet via either satellite or optical fiber.
That's not what the commodities futures markets are for! That kind of "investment" is not investment at all. It's Just Wrong.
The commodities futures markets were created to provide financing for farmers to grow their crops, for livestock herders to feed their cattle and so on. When one bought a contract for pork bellies, for example, when a pig farmer's pigs were eventually slaughtered, one's meat-packing plant would receive a bunch of refrigerated boxcars full of pork.
The guy I worked for "invested" in pork bellies as well, but to prevent a bunch of pig carcasses from ever showing up on his doorstep, one of my tasks was for my code to perform what is called a "roll", in which it would keep track of the delivery date of the contract, then sell it back on the Chicago market.
I don't know what can be done about the stock market, but perhaps one way to control the wild gyrations in the commodities market would be to forbid participation by parties who have no actual use for the physical commodities.
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.... where Xerox marketed the Xerox Alto as the first commercial GUI driven computer in 1973?
As someone who visited PARC in 1975, and later spent some time programming an Alto, I can say that it wouldn't have been cost effective. PARC's plan, in the early 1970s, was to figure out what the future of computing would be like when the cost of hardware came down. The Alto was built without much regard to cost. The page-sized CRTs were hand-built at PARC itself, and the CPUs were made by Data General for Xerox. They were minicomputers, not microprocessors, basically Data General Novas with a different microcode. An Alto cost upwards of $20,000 to make.
Before PCs, there was a whole industry, led by Wang, in what were called "shared-logic word processors". These were a group of dumb terminals connected to a central unit with a CPU, disk, and printer. Places which did a lot of document revision, like law offices, bought such systems. Xerox came out with the Xerox Star, which was a cross between Alto technology and the dedicated word processor concept, and went into that market, at too high a price point. This was in the late 1970s. IBM introduced the IBM Displaywriter in 1980, with the same monitor that was later used with the IBM PC. Three displays, a printer, and a central control unit cost $26,000.
Getting costs down was a huge problem. The consensus in the industry was that the minimum useful personal computer would be a "3M" machine - one megabyte of memory, one MIPS of CPU power, and one megapixel of display. The Alto was there, but the early PCs, the Apple II, and the original Mac were well below those specs. The Lisa approached the 3M level but cost too much. (The original 64K Macintosh was a miserable flop commercially. Until the 512K Mac and the laser printer, with the specs approaching the "3M" level, did it make money.)
There was another line of development - UNIX workstations of the early 1980s. For about $20K, Apollo, Sun, Three Rivers, IBM and others sold UNIX machines with big screens and enough CPU and RAM power to get something done. They all suffered from appallingly bad GUIs. Then, as now, the UNIX crowd had no clue about user interfaces. For years, Sun workstations mostly had nothing but text windows open. (Plus an analog clock, the most widely used graphic program.) What passed for a GUI tended to be some scheme for front-ending command line programs with a menu system.
If the UNIX industry had had a clue about graphics, the industry might have gone that way when the hardware cost came down.
I don't doubt that those who are granted funding at UK universities, having satisfied the 'impact' criteria, will often invent or discover things equally useful but totally unexpected.
What troubles me is that by making every research project comply with the impact criteria, other avenues of inquiry are cut off. At the moment, a proposal to find out (for the sake of argument - I've no idea if it's a good question) why dandelions are yellow would not get funded, but a proposal to boost the yield of rape seed might.
To me it's along the lines of saying that researchers from certain geographical locations, or birthplaces, or with project names beginning with P, will not get funded. It's an arbitrary and misguided hurdle that threatens to kill projects that might otherwise deliver top quality research. No obvious application at the time funding is granted, but subsequently leading to benefits for many.
I mean, there's already lots and lots of commercially focused research, it's not like we're short of people trying to make money...
PARC is now an independent entity, which is not the same as being sold off. It now researches on behalf of other entities besides Xerox, but Xerox remains its largest customer.
Closer, but still not correct. PARC is an independent subsidiary, but fully owned by Xerox.
For a tech savvy bunch, we can't seem to use the internet well.
http://www.parc.com/content/newsroom/factsheet_parc.pdf
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