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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.
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?
Another corporation similar to Rambus which invents stuff and then demands royalties for licenses and patents.
Not at all. PARC invents things and then licenses their inventions to those that would like to commercialize them. Rambus patented something they managed to get written into a JEDEC specification.
You are free to choose whether or not you use PARCs IP. Rambus tried to make it impossible to conform to an industry specification without infringing on their IP.
One is a business, one is a troll. If you can't tell the difference, then too bad for you.
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.... 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.
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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.... 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.